Collaboration With Google Drive: Part Three

This is the third and final installment in a series of postings drawn from a conference session entitled Collaboration with Google Drive,  by Andrea Jones of Franklin Middle School in Fairfax County. In this post we will move on to the use of templates and contact lists in conjunction with Google Drive

Templates

At some ACPS schools, there is a lesson plan template created in Google Docs.  The lesson plan template serves to illustrate how a teacher might create a “handout” assignment in Google Docs and share it with the class, granting students only the right to “view” the documents.  Students could then “make a copy” which they can edit (fill in the answers) and place that copy in their folder which is shared with the teacher. Again, this process should sound very familiar to those teachers who are filling in Google Docs lesson plan templates. If you are not doing your lesson plans in this manner, it might sound very confusing, but, it isn't really--just try it step by step and see how it works. If you run into difficulties, don't hesitate to contact your friendly, local ITRT or to ask one of the teachers I suggested in last week's post.

Contact Lists

In order to facilitate the sharing of documents, it is handy to have student groups within your contact lists. That is, you can create a group with all your students from a particular class. Then, rather than having to share a file with each individual student's Email address, you can just type something like "second block" and share it with all  twenty-some odd students in second block. (I've had classes where quite a number of the students were odd).

Andrea suggested that the first time you have your class use Google Drive you may want them to fill out a form in which they enter their account address--which would enter them in a column on a spreadsheet. This, in turn, would allow you quickly and easily create a group of contacts by copying and paste-ing the column of addresses as you create a contact group.  There are other ways as well, of creating groups of contacts and it sure makes things a lot easier to share a document with a class full of students. If you’d like help with creating groups in your contacts, let your ITRT know.

illustrations of how to switch to contacts, where to find forms, the spreadsheet--might be included. 

Assorted Notes

Andrea pointed out the different types of files that can be created and shared--documents, spreadsheets, forms (quizzes, surveys), presentations, and drawings.  She mentioned that some tools are only visible when an item on the page is selected--so students shouldn't panic if it at first appears that they can’t do something.  She suggested that “Chrome” is the best browser to use in conjunction with Google Drive.

Next week we'll move on to another topic, see you then.

Collaboration With Google Drive: Part Two

A Happy New Year to you all.
Continuing on with what I learned from a session entitled Collaboration with Google Drive,  by Andrea Jones of Franklin Middle School in Fairfax County. Let's get to the mechanics of Google Drive.

File Management  

First, one can very quickly accumulate an unwieldy number of files in one's drive.  Therefore, organization is critical.  Put some forethought into naming conventions.  That is to say, think about if you want students to turn in work with titles based on assignment number, subject, student name, date, class period, etc.  Next, realize that it is crucial to organize files into folders.  Every folder is going to be “owned” by someone--in this discussion, either the teacher or a student.  The owner houses the  folder on their “My Drive”.  A folder can then be shared with others who might be granted various levels of permission.  Any document placed in that folder by default “inherits” the permissions assigned to that folder.  If a teacher creates a folder and shares it with students, those students might be given the rights to edit or view documents in the folder.    

My false starts experiences suggest that I should have listened to Melissa in the first place and had teachers set up their own folders for lesson plans.  Applying this to the classroom, you might want to have students set up their own folders--so that they own them, and then have the students share the folders with you.  If you do that, you’d have one folder per student in your “shared with me” or "incoming" drive.  I’d suggest you group these as sub-folders by block (or by subject if you are an elementary teacher) and copy them to "my drive" (thanks Ms. Walker for that suggestion.) Students might want several folders--where they keep documents (files or assignments) which they are not ready to “hand in.”   Andrea pointed out that if the student “owns” the folder, the teacher can delete it at the end of the year and the student can keep it to accumulate a portfolio of work done over a number of school years.

File Types

Andrea pointed out the different types of files that can be created and shared--documents, spreadsheets, forms, presentations, and drawings.  She mentioned that some tools are only visible when an item on the page is selected--so students shouldn't panic if it at first appears that they can’t do something.  She suggested that “Chrome” is the best browser to use in conjunction with Google Drive.

Monitoring Tools

Andrea then spent quite a bit of time on the use of “revision history,” “comments,” and “notifications” which can be used as monitoring tools to allow the teacher to evaluate how much was contributed by individual group members.  To go into specifics here would make this entry far too long, but Melissa presented an overview in her post on May 7th (The Ultimate Workflow) and I’d be happy to work with anyone who might want to use these features but feels the need for some support in doing so. Needless to say, once the students realize that the teacher is monitoring who is doing what, the problem of one student doing all the work is greatly alleviated.

Management Tools

Before I conclude, let me mention a few management tools that might be helpful and may also become subjects of future blog posts.  Doctopus is an “add-on” available for Google Sheets (their spreadsheet program) that is designed to manage student group projects.  Doctopus is described as “An octopus for docs!  Teacher-built tool for scaffolding, managing, organizing, and assessing student projects in Google Drive.”  A second "add-on" is Gclassfolders  which “will automatically create and share student folders for a  teacher.”

Finally, since attending the conference, Google has come out with classroom.google.com a classroom management site offering some of the same features as Edmodo.  

Well, this posts seems very lengthy, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with it, I know that, as time passes, more and more of you will be using Google Drive with your students and I hope that this review will both encourage you to do so, and give you some insight into how to best manage that process. Some experienced teachers who would be good resources on the would be Amanda Mitchel, Amanda Hruska, and Kathy Evans (NHS), Melanie Walker (AHS) and Judy Fieth (CHS).
Next week we'll move on to the use of templates and contact lists in Google Drive.

Collaboration With Google Drive; Part One

The final session I have to report on from the 2014 GAFE summit will be on a session entitled Collaboration with Google Drive,  by Andrea Jones of Franklin Middle School in Fairfax County. This report may take me several postings.

As the title suggests,  this session dealt with practical tips and understandings helpful in using the sharing capacities of Google Drive.  After reviewing my session notes, I am left wishing I had done so before we set up the lesson plan folders.  I’ll try to use what Andrea said, as well as what I learned from my own mistakes efforts, to come up some suggestions which may be helpful to you.  Some of this information was also covered in Melissa’s entry “The Ultimate Workflow.”

The first thing I learned from this session, was rather tangential to the session itself, but, very useful nevertheless. It was in regard to the website Goo.gl  This site is the “Google URL Shortener”.  Have you ever had one of those long web addresses that would just be too complicated to try and give to all your students?  One solution (there are others) is to go to goo.gl and enter the long address, then click on “shorten” and Google will give you a shorter (though case sensitive) address that will be much easier to have your students type in to their browsers.  In addition, if you have a Google account, or establish one with goo.gl, you can have goo.gl do analytic analysis of the page for which you pasted in the address.  That is, it will keep track of how many clicks that page gets, what countries, browsers, and operating systems they came from, as well as what search engines may have referred the user to the site. Similarly, TinyURL.com allows you to shorten a URL giving it a custom name such as TinyURL.com/historyworksheet.

We haven't yet started in on the main subject of this review, however I think I'll quit here and plan to get to it in part two--after Christmas break. Speaking of which, have a very Merry Christmas and a relaxing winter break.

Improving Student Writing with Google Drive

This session from the VA GAFE Summit was presented by Melissa Powell, a 6th grade reading teacher and Katie Plunkett, an ITRT - both from Charlottesville City Schools (CCS). CCS began using Google in October of 2013, so this was still fairly new to the presenters. Students were given basic training, such as how to log in, creating documents and sharing (view, comment, edit rights). After a short period of time it was obvious the students needed more training, such as formatting and how to organize their Drive.
Melissa wanted to move student writing to Google Drive for a number of reasons - get rid of the stacks of paper journals, ease of drafting and rewriting, convenience of commenting; and most of all, to give students a wider audience for their work.
Students were taught  how to give quality feedback and to comment properly. This process was modeled using a fake document. The teachers used a simple technique called TAG:

• Tell something you liked
• Ask a question
• Give a compliment

As both teachers and students became comfortable with the process the projects grew in length and rigor. Some of the projects included:

• Spooky story starters - a way for students to begin collaborative writing (example - notice teacher comments for the students on the right side).
• Personal narratives (example)
• Using Google Draw to create simple layouts to demonstrate text features of non-fiction (example)
• Poetry writing

Looking back over the transition to use of Google Drive the teachers had the following reflections:

• Start at the beginning of the year
• Student writing increased because the students liked using Google Drive
• Composition and expression improved
• Mechanics are improving more slowly
• Drive allows for more efficient, quality feedback and comments
• The need for more structure in the form of checklists and notes sheets (hard copies)
• No carrying notebooks and papers home to grade
• The need for more front end organization - organizing teachers' Drives to handle all the student work being shared - set up folders, color code, mini-lessons to show the students computer skills needed.
• Use Google Sites to create student portfolios

The Ultimate Workflow

As most readers have gathered by now, Larry and I went to the Virginia Google Apps for Education Summit in Charlotttesville, VA in early March. Larry has been posting about some of the things he picked up and now it is my turn.
The first session I attended was The Ultimate Workflow presented by Ken Shelton, a Google Certified teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator from Los Angeles. The topic was using Google Docs to maximize productivity and he was full of tips and tricks. When we migrate to use of GAFE in the 2014-15 school year, these will come in handy! Remember, workflow = productivity.

• Color code your folders within your Drive to visually identify the content of the folder. Documents are automatically created in whatever folder you have open.
• Name your documents immediately!! (There is no "File - Save" option in Google as documents are automaticaly saved every 3-7 seconds depending on your network integrity.)
• When using Drive with your students have a naming convention and use it. "Section First Last Project" (or something similar) - such as "2 John Doe Recycling Project". The individual pieces of the name are searchable within your drive.
• Right click on any word in a document and select define for definition or research to automatically search Google for information The research pane allows you to preview the web page, insert a link and also cite the page without leaving the document. Can use arrow at top of research pane to change the style of citation between MLA, APA and Chicago. Can also use that arrow to change the license filter. Can toggle between definition and research pane. If you highlight footnote number along with anything you want to move it will automatically renumber footnotes. Under the research pane you can change the source of searching from everything (web), images, scholar, quotes, dictionary, personal, tables.
• Use of the comment feature in Docs allows for timely, meaningful feedback. They are dated and time stamped. Comments will automatically disappear when marked by a user as resolved - you can elect to receive an email when this occurs so you know when your students have resolved an issue.
• Notifications - set at “all” so you have a record of everything that went on in the document.
• Share documents from folders so anything in the folder defaults to the parent permission of the folder. You must manually change a document in the folder you do not want shared (or put it in a different folder.
• You can use Revision History to see who is doing the work in a collaborative document. The revision history shows who did what, such as deleting crucial parts of document. Once in revision history pane you can see detailed revisions.
• In your Drive, going back to “Recent” and “List view” shows the items that have been modified most recently - can see if a student is not working and should be.  Naming protocols are very useful here.
• When sharing documents keep in mind the various permission levels. "Can view" allows users to view the document but make no changes or comments. "Can comment" allows users to comment on the document. This is useful for peer review as well as teacher grading. "Can edit" gives users complete rights to make changes to the document, as well as comment. Students need to be very familiar with these levels.

Motivational Keynote

On the weekend of March 8th and 9th, 2014, Melissa and I attended the Google Apps for Education Summit in Charlottesville, VA.  Saturday's Keynote Address was by Rushton Hurley founder of Next Vista for Learning.  This was intended as an inspirational talk designed to get teachers to try something new.  Here I'm going to repeat an illustration he gave, restate the suggestions he made, and then list a few resources which were given by him or others in the room who were having a "back channel discussion" using TodaysMeet.

Mr. Hurley used circus elephants as an illustration.  When the elephant is young, his leg is chained to a stake.  At first this may be a traumatic experience for the baby elephant as it tries to escape but learns that this effort is useless.  In a few days the elephant learns that if he doesn't struggle, it doesn't hurt.  In a short while the elephant's attempt to escape cease.  Eventually the elephant grows to the point where pulling up the stake or braking the chain would be a simple matter--however, he long ago stopped trying.  Therefore, the chain which is really binding him is in his mind.

This illustration poses the question; "What are your chains?" In other words, what "chains" are in place that prevent you from changing your classroom mechanics.

Mr. Hurley went on to offer seven general suggestions for spicing up ones teaching.  Here they are:

1. Break your chains by shooting for the moon.
2. Use visuals
3. Use what others have done (citing the sources)
4. Collaborate
5. Give your students choices
6. Get feedback so that you can improve
7. Learn something new.

Now to be a bit more concrete and give you something you might be able to immediately use....

The suggestion was made that instead of having all your students take notes  (during a lecture) why not have a "primary" and "secondary" note-taker and let the other students listen intently (the way students do).  The role of the secondary note-taker is to edit the notes taken by the primary note-taker--making sure nothing of importance was left out.  At the end of class display the notes and ask if anything major is missing, then simply share these notes with the whole class.  If you are using Google Drive, that would be the easiest way to accomplish this.  However, at this point, with only a few ACPS teachers using Google Drive, DropBox and DropItTo.me might also be used as well as a host of other sites which any of the ITRTs would be happy to introduce you to. Next year, with ACPS "going Google" using Google Drive/Docs will be possible.

A specific way of implementing suggestion five above, would be to let students make their own assignment.  While in the classroom, for roughly every third assignment Mr. Hurley gave, he would give students the option of making up their own assignments provided they covered the right material and involved as much work as the "default assignment" (the assignment the students would do if they didn't want to create their own.)

In reference to numbers two and three above, he stated his conviction that the students would work harder and produce much higher quality work if they knew they were creating something that would be "published."  If the student knows the teacher is going to look at his/her work s/he makes it "good enough", but if the student knows classmates or a wider audience will see the work s/he makes it "great".  Additionally, when a student makes a video they know they have something to contribute.  Rushton's site, Next Vista for Learning (NextVista) routinely offers student video contests.  This site now hosts a library of over 1200 videos by and for students and teachers.  You'll find NextVista's search box for locating useful videos, or for submitting your own videos, here. NextVista also provides links to many other useful resources here.  

Be sure and leave a comment below if this post brings to mind anything useful you might like to share with others.  Now that you've been motivated and inspired, if you'd like help trying something new please contact your friendly, local ITRT.