Promoting Creativity and Collaboration in Your Classroom with Google Docs

Martha Abadie
Petal High School
mabadie@gmail.com

Steve C. Yuen, Ph.D.
The University of Southern Mississippi
steve.yuen@usm.edu

 Free, easy-to-use online productivity suite
 Remote, multi-user, interactive editing
 Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation,
and forms applications
 Input and export using variety of file types
 Upload from and save to your desktop
 Edit anytime, from anywhere
 Share, collaborate, and chat in real time
 Store files securely online
 No more misplaced files or papers
 No software installation

 Access levels:
• Viewers - view only
• Collaborators - edit and view simultaneously

 Simultaneous editing:
 10 people can edit a Presentation at the same time.
 50 people can edit a Spreadsheet simultaneously.
 10 people can edit a Document at the same time.

 A limit of 200 combined viewers/collaborators for all of
the different document types.

 Teachers and students can
• create or upload their own documents
• invite others to share them by email address
• edit documents online with anyone they choose
• publish the documents online to the world or only to
whom they choose
• post their documents to a blog
 Students no longer need to e-mail files to
other group members and deal with the
confusion that often occurs regarding
software compatibility issues

 Promote group collaboration and creativity
as students complete group projects
together
 Facilitate collaborative presentation skills
as students work together on a shared
presentation for a class project or
assignment
 Provide an easy way to assess collaborative
effort, presentation skills, spreadsheet
skills, as well as writing, editing, and
revision skills
 Promote group work and peer editing skills

 Publish school announcements or
upcoming assignments
 Monitor student progress via an interactive
process
 Create digital portfolios online allowing
peers to evaluate and comment
 Conduct online survey and analysis using
Google Form and Google Spreadsheet
 Provide feedback from teachers or parents
on assignments, projects, and school
activities

 Teacher as Owner or Collaborator
• Can give feedback in progress
• Can observe work in progress
• Can track student participation

 Teacher as Viewer only
• Can track student participation
• Cannot give feedback

 Teach students how to organize their work
 Organization is easy with Google Docs -- color
labels, folders, and stars add layers of
customizability and individuality
 Teach them how to customize
 Show them there are other features they can
upload
 Above all, teach them to keep it all private
 Give students plenty of time to play with the
features
 It's so easy to use that they will learn it quickly
and some will surpass you in their Google Docs
sophistication

 Start small and slow, feature by feature
 How to upload files
 Revision History: teachers’ dream
 Renaming, Copying, Downloading
 Using HTML, CSS
 Inserting text, images, drawing, tables, shapes
 Using the comment boxes, special characters
 The Google definition of a page
 Translating, Word Count, Thesaurus/Dictionary,
Bookmarks
 Google's Extensive Help Feature

 Make assignments that force students to use
the features
 For example: From an AP English IV class,
Dissect Robert Frost's short poem "Dust of
Snow.“ Let the students determine how they
will attack this
• Who will upload poem and invite group members?
• Who will color code label the literary devices?
• Who will begin the essay or presentation?
• Who will be "Chief Editor“?

 Have the student groups plan the second phase
of the assignment, enhancing the document
when the essay is done:
 Who will find images?
• Students can search images together, commenting on
the choices in the comment box
 Will students add personal drawings?
• Students can scan these in and upload them directly
 What kind of table will students make?
• Students can categorize literary elements
• Students can color code inside the table
 Let students determine how they plan to use the
shapes

 Assess
students’ work right on their
document, using Revision History
• Students can revise before your final grade
• Teacher has online proof of who did what
• It's done so quickly
• You can add parents as collaborators

 Kick it up a notch or two:
 Add research components to the assignments
 Have the students compress their essays into
cool presentations
 Add a spreadsheet component
• Students can plot the number of poems published by Frost
in different years, for example
• Allow students to insert whatever they want into a
spreadsheet
 Add a forms component
• You will find uses for these quite easily
• Hold a brainstorming session to let the students generate
ideas for making forms and using them in their
presentations

 Devise a whole-class project, and give everyone a task
• For example: An English teacher whose students are
studying poetry and writing-experimenting-illustrating
their own may want to produce a class anthology.
 For an assignment this big, allow plenty of time to plan
 Hold a brainstorming session to list all the steps and tasks
 Assign tasks and deadlines together
 Hold a class-review day at agreed-upon intervals
 Publish in a hard copy or to a website when it's finished
 Invite your principal, parents (whoever) & hold a Viewing

 Really make the students work
 Let the students decide in their groups how
they want to conduct an online survey –
• What do they want to know?
• Whom do they want to query?
• How will they tabulate their results?
• How will they present their findings?
 Review spreadsheet quickly with a simple, fun
class survey

 Kansas State Professor created a Google
Doc to facilitate a brainstorming session in
ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural
Anthropology

 367 edits made in one week.

 "Students
wrote the script, suggested
survey questions to ask the entire class. The
survey was administered the following
week.”
Source: A Vision of Students Today. http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119

• Use a single shared spreadsheet for
the whole class.
• Add the children's names in the first
few columns.
• Add Pulse Rate 1, Pulse Rate 2
...along the column headings.
• When exploring resting pulse rate or
pulse rate change ask the whole class
to add their data at the same time.
• Pooled data could then be analyzed, averaged, charted and
explored.
• The sharing of data from peers helps children to think about
the accuracy and reliability of science data and to deal with
a larger data set quickly.
Source: Tom Barrett . Nineteen Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom

 This is a good activity to model the use of a
shared space and live editing, as well as
learning about a new class.
 It can be done in any of the Doc types.
 Ask your class to individually work on a
single shared Document and finish the
sentence: "I am Unique because...“
 They can add 3 different answers.
 Not only will you learn about your children
but as it is shared they will learn about each
other.

Source: Tom Barrett . Nineteen Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom

 Student feedback survey
 Data Collection
• Poll
• Survey
 Registration
 Resource collection and publishing

Source: Lowentha and Thai. Creating & Using Google Form. University of Colorado Denver | CU Online

Source: Lowentha and Thai. Creating & Using Google Form. University of Colorado Denver | CU Online

Questions or Comments?

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Promoting Creativity and Collaboration in Your Classroom with Google Docs

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