(http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs.html)
This video and link is a great resource for educators. There were many great ideas I was able to pull from this link. I also realized how beneficial this is in the classroom. Here are some of the main points I took away from this video and website:
- Students can work from school and home; no more, "I forgot my work" excuses.
- The revisions are saved and documented so you can see who edited the page and when.
- Students love to collaborate and edit. You can see who is also editing the page at the same time.
- Teachers (after receiving an invite) can comment on students' work at any time and track progress.
- You can organize work into folders.
- Publishing the work to a website or blog gives the students a purpose to write, rather than just for a grade.
- You can easily create a poll or survey with the spreadsheet function.
- You can import an existing PowerPoint presentation and even publish the presentation to the web.
Here are some assignment examples that this website provided:
- Documents
- Journaling
- Essays (individual or co-edited)
- Collaborative research papers (history, geography, science)
- Collaborative book reports
- Creative writing (script writing and poetry)
- Writing portfolios
- Spreadsheets
- Stock portfolio (live data)
- Graphs, charts, and data presentation techniques
- Presentations
- Presenting group research
- Active student participation during a presentation
I hope that now you have a better understanding of the many benefits of using Google Docs in the classroom!
I am excited to trying Google Docs with my students. My wife used Google Docs in grad school and found it was a wonderful way to access her documents and notes from anywhere. If you know me personally you may know that my wife and I are undergoing a big renovation project on a house. We have found so far that Google Docs has allowed us to access our budget and questions for our builders from anywhere.
ReplyDeleteIn school the students currently have a shared drive. Unfortunately, it can only be accessed from school. We hear sob stories time and again about students forgetting to save copies on thumb drives to take home or to losing their thumb drives. The students claim that if they could email themselves this problem would be resolved. Google docs rememdies this problem for me.