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

Inbox Zero

This is a review of “Find Extra Hours in Your Week: Calendar and Gmail Tricks to Save You Time” by Jennie Magiera.  

Due to the nature of the conference, Jennie’s information was all directed at users of Google Calendars and Gmail.  My remarks today will be confined to her suggestions related to Gmail.  Next year, as you know, ACPS teachers will be migrating to Gmail.  

Jennie urged us to keep the number of emails in our inboxes to zero.  All of the tips below are not only suggested as a way of saving time, but as a way of keeping a tidy inbox.

For example, Jennie suggested the use of keyboard shortcuts.  I did not know, for example, that by entering the letter “c” the box pops up where you can compose a new Email. Although I did go to “settings” and turn them on, I have not started using any of these shortcuts yet, I was just reminded of them when I begin reviewing the material for this post. There are around seventy of these shortcuts, so I’m sure I’ll never learn them all. I've just installed a chrome app known as KeyRocket which is designed to teach keyboard shortcuts. When you do a particular action, a small box pops up and tells you what shortcut you might have used. Having done that, perhaps I’ll start learning some of these shortcuts. I don’t believe I’ll ever achieve the 200-300 finger actions per minute required to become an expert gamer, however, over time, keyboard shortcuts may indeed save me some time.

Here are some other Gmail tips Jennie offered:

• Have mail from all of your email addresses forwarded to your personal Gmail account (you can still send outgoing emails using the return address and signature line from your other accounts)
• Use filters to search through your emails--even archived mail
• Use “labels” (tags) for sorting purposes--you can give an email multiple labels and get it out of your inbox at the same time
• Use filters to send automatic, canned responses to selected emails
• Use templates to speed in responding to emails
• Color code emails
• “Unsend” an email (if you act quickly enough)
• Use the Boomerang App to have unopened emails sent back to you
• Use Boomerang to have selected emails returned to you after a set time period
• Schedule the sending of outgoing mail
• Use a “vacation responder” to send canned responses while you are getting away from it all
• Transfer emails to a “todo” list which integrates with Google Calendars

I don’t know about you, but I appreciate all of these time-saving tips as well as the encouragement to keep the size of my inbox down--things which don’t come naturally to me.  I hope I have wetted your appetite for one of the first changes you will notice next year--Gmail

The Art Project

Jim Sill, a former television and movie producer, presented a session on the Google Art Project.  If you have some time after the SOLs and before the end of the year, you may with to create a lesson based on the Google Art Project which is part of a larger effort by Google known as the Google Cultural Institute.

You have probably heard that Google is digitizing books which are out of copyright, and putting them on the internet.  You are also familiar with Google Earth.  Okay, so the Google Art Project kind of combines these ideas for works of art.  The Google Art project, as of this writing, works with 345 museums throughout the world and contains 63,684 works by 8,574 artist, which various users (such as us) have arranged into 26,518 galleries.  At some of these museums the user can go to a ground level view (as with Google Earth) and use the mouse to walk around the museum.  Some of the works of art are featured in extremely high resolution--like ten billion little pixels.  

I especially like the different filters you can use when searching through this volume of material.  A user can search by artists, by collection, by medium (oil, pen and ink, bronze, etc.) by the event that inspired the artwork, by the date it was created, by media type (video, photo, etc.), or by place.  In addition, a user can search the galleries created by other users--for example one might search using “math” as a filter.  In this case the result may be a collection of pictures accompanied by questions on the prominent angles in the picture.  The person who compiled the gallery may also have embedded links, or perhaps even a video on various artworks in the gallery.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the technical aspects of how to use the art project.  Rather, let me just state that as far as “how to use” it, you could certainly use it in teaching art, or math (see above), or history--(search by material and date and the students will immediately be able to see when the bronze age was), or literature (analyze the relationship between the artwork of a period on the literature produced in that period), or science (I find a photo of a solar eclipse taken in 1889--the user included an embedded map showing the exact location where the photo was taken.)  I even found a gallery named “Bias Awareness and Bullying Prevention.”  

I’ve tried to keep this post short and interesting, so that you have the curiosity and time to go to the Google Art Project and check it out for yourself.  Click on Mr. Sill, if you wish to check out all of the resources he made available in relation to this session.  Finally, if you visit the Google Cultural Institute, you might also want to check out the World Monuments and Historic Moments which are there along with the Art Project.

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.

Building a Google Earth Tour the Easier Way

In my last post I introduced Google Earth Tours and stated that in a future posting I would give you information on how to build a Google Earth Tour the "Easy Way"--as explained by Tim Stahmer.  I'm going to change that a bit.  I used "Maps Engine Lite" and a spread sheet to create a KML file, as Mr. Stahmer suggested and found that it was indeed pretty easy.  However, I then tried "Tour Builder with Google"  and found it to be easier yet.

Although it is the "beta" version and is labelled an "experiment," I found that Tour Builder worked very smoothly, was self explanatory and intuitive to the point where I really find it unnecessary to explain it in any great detail here.  I'll just give you a brief overview and link to a sample I made which pertains to the Geography SOL on the monuments of Latin America .

To build your own tour simply follow this link and sign in with your Google account.  Of course, if you don't have a Google account you'll have to create one (remember that next year you will have a Google account through ACPS).  After logging in, you might want to click on either "View a Tour" to see a sample--or perhaps you'd rather click on "gallery" and choose a sample to view from a list of Tours.

Eventually, you'll want to click on "create a tour" and start building your own.  After naming your tour and naming yourself as the author you are then sent to an introduction page.  There you'll want to describe what your tour will be about, perhaps you'll want to add a photo to this cover page.  These tasks are so easily accomplished that there is no need for me to describe them.

The next step is to add the locations you want on your tour.  You simply click  on "add location" and begin to type in a name...with all of the locations on my sample tour,  it automatically completed the location before I finished it.  I tried my location--"Modest Town, Virginia" and it handled that just fine.  In a window on the right I flew there in just seconds and viewed clear satellite images of all my neighbors' houses.  You can adjust this view using controls which appear when you run your mouse over the image.  When you get things adjusted to a view you like, you can lock that view in so that it is what the student sees as they take the tour--although they will be able to pause the tour and experiment with the controls.  For example, by moving the little statue type figure on to the image, they can see what the "ground level" view looks like for that location.  By going under "advanced options" and clicking on "show historical imagery" one can even add a slide bar allowing the viewer to see satellite images from earlier years (the earliest I found was 1931).  This could be really useful in a lot of ways.  For example for a science teacher who wants to teach about the changing shoreline.

It is easy to add up to 25 copyright free images (per location) from Wikipedia or other sources.  It is easy to add links to articles about the location.  It is easy to add videos --however, it is not so easy to add a video that actually works with our filters.

After you click on "done editing" a "share" button appears which gives you a web address which you pass on to those to whom you wish to grant access to your tour.  The address is long and complicated--so it would be best to either shorten it, or post a link to a site students can just click on (I'd be happy to work with you on that). A simple URL shortener is http://goo.gl/ - simply paste the long URL into the box on this site, click "Shorten URL" and a shortened URL is automatically created.  Portaportal is one good site for sharing bookmarks.

In summary, Google Tour Builder is user friendly and an extremely useful tool.  I would think a geography teacher would want to make tours taking the students to the sol listed monuments on each region of the world.  I;m not sure I can come up with any immediate applications for math teachers, but I can think of them for almost every other subject area.  I can also see engaging students by having them build their own tours.

Google Earth Tours

This post, like my other recent posts, is based on a session from the Virginia Google Apps for Education Summit held the weekend of March 8-9, 2014.  This particular post is a commentary on a session by Tim Stahmer, from Fairfax County Public Schools.  The title of his session was Building Google Earth Tours the Easy Way. But, before we can get to that information, you have to be familiar with Google Tours. A Google Earth Tour is a presentation which plays in Google Earth. That is, the viewer "flies" around from one spot to another--either self guided, or by allowing it to play by itself. The tour can be paused at any time so the viewer can click on a particular location and view the information in the pop-up box about that location. Information may include a brief description, images, videos, links, etc. The viewer can also zoom in, switch to "street level view" change the angle--you know, all the cool stuff Google Earth is so good at.

I'd suggest that when you finish reading this post you go to Google Lit Trips, find a work of literature you are familiar with, and take a tour.

At the elementary level I clicked on the title Make Way for Ducklings. A webpage appeared in which there was hypertext in the upper right which said “View in Your Browser” - I clicked on it and viewed it in Google Chrome.  When I wanted a tour for A Walk Down Cannery Row I first had to fill out a survey. Then, I was taken to this site, and, from a link in the upper right side of the page, I downloaded a kmz file which, when clicked, opened in Google Earth. If you don't have Google Earth on your computer, you'll need to download it first.  Once it opened, I hovered my mouse over a folder--and a label popped up which said “play”  When I clicked on it, the tour began.  

I’m writing this in the CHS Media Center, and as Mrs. Merritt clicked on Chasing Lincoln’s Killer in Internet Explorer a window popped up allowing her to save or open the file, so the behavior might vary depending on your browser, but you ought to be able to figure it out.

I haven’t been able to find anywhere where Google has a sortable archive of tours--if you are aware of one, please send Larry the link.  However, I wanted to see if I could find a tour based on medieval Europe.  So, I just did an advanced search on medieval Europe and came up with a tour of locations relevant to the crusades.   To do an advanced search for tours at google.com click on "settings" (or the "tools" icon) chose "advanced search", then choose "file type KMZ")

Here are a few sites that have links to various Google Earth Tours:

• Sample Google Earth Tours
• America: A Narrative History

These two sites provide information on using Google Earth, such as lessons and how to use the controls. Both also have a variety of tours:

1. Google Earth for Educators
2. Google Earth Lessons

Next week we'll continue this discussion with information on how to build your own Google Earth Tour.

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.
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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