Ten GoogleDocs Add-Ons

I've been exploring some "add-ons" for GoogleDocs.  When editing a GoogleDoc you might have noticed the Tab which says "Add-ons."  If you click on it and from the pull down menu select "get add-ons" a window will open up listing a choice of tools developed by third parties (not by Google) which can be added on to GoogleDocs.  You can also search through these tools via the search box at the top of the window.  Here is a quick report on ten of the "add-ons" which are available there.

Recommended:

1. url shortener - builds goo.gl into  google docs - creates a short link to the doc you are working in or a highlighted link within the document. This add on is easy to use and extremely useful - I'd highly recommend it. For more on goo.gl click here.

2.  Lucidchart - good for adding thinking maps, and charts. You create an account at a Lucidchart site. At this site you produce and store diagrams. Then, when working in GoogleDocs, you click on the LucidChart add-on and a list of the charts you've created appears. From this list you can insert a chart into your document. I found the site to be fairly intuitive and easy to use. I'd recommend this add-on for about any teacher. I'm not sure to what extent mind maps are being pushed on teachers these days, but, be that as it may, they are a valuable teaching tool for anyone who needs to teach concepts.

3. Easy Accents - This is an add on which enables you to use all those foreign accents--ñ, œö, ü, ú, ó, etc. It is super easy to add on and use and I'd certainly recommend it for our Spanish, French and perhaps our ELL teachers. The chief limitation is that it includes only five languages.

4. GradingHelp - This would be a great add on for English teachers--however, after a trial period, it it cost $30 for six months. I'd recommend that you wait until you will be having a lot of papers to grade, and then sign up for the ten day free trial. Here is how it works. You open a student's document in Docs, then you highlight a section of the document you see a problem with and click on GradingHelp, a sidebar opens up from which you choose a category--for example, "punctuation," then a subcategory, and finally, a comment such as “hyphen needed.” GradingHelp creates a comment for you such as "Punctuation - These words work together as a compound adjective; connect them with a hyphen. (h1)" in a comment box which you have opened on the side. In other words, you can quickly add comments which would take you a long time to write out.

Not for Me:

5. MindMeister- The description states that it "lets you turn any bullet point list into a visually appealing mind map." For me, it turned a simple list into a flow chart (which was not appropriate) and left off the last point. Based on that, I wouldn't recommend MindMeister. However, if you have a real need for this sort of thing, you might find that through enough experimentation, you can master it and make it useful to you.

6. Hello Sign - The idea is to make it possible for you to add a signature to a GoogleDocs document.  The problem is that first you need to create a signature to add. I tried this with both a mouse and a touchpad and found that I did not have the patience to create a decent looking signature. Perhaps with a fine stylus it could be done, but, I don't think most people will find it worth the effort.

7. Openclipart - I installed it and tried it and my first impression of it was very favorable. However, then I tried inserting clip art without the add on. I just clicked on "insert" then "image" and found that I could do a Google search which gave me far more images to choose from. Although Openclipart seems to give you additional assurance that you won't inadvertently violate a copyright, however, if you'll go back and read this blog post, I don't think you'll find that a concern anyway (as long as your use is for an educational purpose.)

8. ProWritingAid - "improve your writing. Check your writing for consistency, plagiarism, acronyms, cliches, redundancies, grammar mistakes and more." I conceived of this as useful to an English teacher who wanted to check his student's documents for plagiarism. I was disappointed to find that it is not as free as it first appears, it was unable to detect that I had plagiarized from Wikipedia. Furthermore, in a sentence about the state legislature, it suggested I might want to use the term "tell us" rather than "state." This is not an add on that I'd recommend.

9. Gliffy (diagrams made easy) - This should be very similar to Lucidchart. However, it took me to a site that had it's content missing. I just couldn't get it to work. Perhaps you'll have better luck, if you want to give it a try, here is their website.

10. Thesaurus - With this add-on I've had it work as expected, not work at all, and work but produce no results.  Useful if it works, but, from my experience, I can't recommend it.

.

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.

Re-Charging Classroom Instruction with YouTube Edu and Google Apps

This session was presented by Kim Randall who makes her living doing these types of workshops around the world.  However, while sitting through the session, I thought she was a classroom teacher, because all that she suggested seemed very practical, do-able, and valuable.  Here I'll recap of some of the strategies she suggested and I'll provide you the list of resource links she accompanied them with.  Although you won't be able to use these strategies quite the way she anticipates (because our students won't have Google accounts until next year) with some modifications they could be used this year.

Strategy One- Vocabulary Development - this strategy could be used when teaching or introducing a wide variety of material.  Kim turned the session into a classroom and the session participants into engaged learners.  She first showed us a video on the City of London, a city of 11,000 people which is surrounded by London, a city of 7,000,000 people.  She paused the four minute video repeatedly to allow us to write down seven to ten key words or phrases.  Then she had us put ourselves into groups in which we agreed on a group list of 7-10 key words or phrases, which a group recorder typed these into a Google form.  From the form the terms went into a Google drive spread sheet from which she copied and pasted into Wordle to create a word cloud.

Strategies Two and Three - Using Google Draw Graphic Organizers - If you have a Google account, perhaps you are familiar with Google Drive.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Google Drive, let me give you a brief introduction, as NEXT YEAR you will have an ACPS Google account.  Google Drive is similar to DropBox in that it provides cloud (online) storage.  Additionally, there is an online word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet, etc.  Each of these applications can be used collaboratively--two or more people can edit the document simultaneously.

Among these applications is "Google Draw"--which I had previously disregarded as not all that relevant to the high school classroom.  Well, I was wrong.  Kim Randall had us take what we had learned and collaboratively enter it into a couple of different graphic organizers.  I believe she made these herself, but there are a number of templates available for Venn diagrams and that sort of thing.
.
Strategie Four - Three Facts and a Fib. Another activity session participants engaged in was to read through four statements and try to identify the fib.  These predictions were entered into a Google form so that the "class" could immediately see how many class members chose each of the four statements.  We then watched a YouTube EDU video on sea turtles to find out if we were correct.  This seems to be a very useful way of getting students to pay close attention to educational videos.  Of course there are many variations of this activity--for example having students watch a video and then create their own list of three facts and a fib.

Strategy Five - Half  the Story.  With this one, the teacher takes an image and simply crops out half of it. The students then speculate on what the missing part of the image shows.

Strategy Six - Caption It - Show the students an image and have them create a caption for it, thus encouraging them to study and analyze the image.  As a former social studies teacher I can see a lot of applications for this,.

Here is the list of resources Ms. Randall provided for use with these strategies--or some strategy of your own.

• www.youtube.com/education
• www.youtube.com/teachers
• www.youtube.com/schools
• http://www.google.com/edu/
• www.google.com/drive
• www.wordle.net
• www.google.com/images
• www.flickr.com      
• www.pics4learning.com