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Posts tagged Google Docs
Marmite: Love it or Hate it? – Using Google Forms and Twitter
Mar 15th
Over the next two weeks in our year 5 class we will be exploring data investigation and the tools with which we can use to undertake them. The first three days of this week we will be looking at some technology that can enhance data handling and make our life easier. In today’s session we learned about Google Forms and I demonstrated how they work with the help of my Twitter network.
We wanted to achieve three things from our maths session today
- Make a short survey using a Google Form.
- Complete other people’s surveys and get a feel for the process.
- Review the data added to our own and explore some of the ways it is represented.
After placing the lesson in the context you see in the first paragraph, I began the session by explaining that I was going to use my Twitter network to help demonstrate how we can use Google Forms to collect data.
I spent some time with the class going through the process of creating a Form from the Google Docs home screen and then adding my questions and running through the different types of questions you can use. We talked a lot about how this type of data collection is only good for some occasions and a pencil and paper method can still be the best way. It is a matter of choosing the most appropriate.
The class would be making a simple favourites or preference type survey and so our shared one was similar. You can see it embedded in the post below.
Once complete, I sent out the link to this to my Twitter network (Look at the bottom of the Form edit page for the link – I used bit.ly to shorten it for Twitter, more on that later!) I did this because I wanted the children to see data being added, I wanted to demonstrate the moment of data submission from the Google Form. This also helps the children see how a spreadsheet is linked to the form. (15 minutes)
We switched to the spreadsheet and the children thought it was rather magical as the responses started to drop into the cells as we watched. I reminded them that as soon as someone clicks SUBMIT we were seeing the result.
The children then worked in groups of three with a single laptop (2 groups per table) – one of the children signed into their Google Docs (part of Google Apps for Education) account and created their own “Favourites” Google Form. To keep the children focused I asked them to only give 5 choices for their questions otherwise they tend to get longwinded and only create one or two questions. (15 minutes)
One of the useful things about writing up lesson experiences on my blog is that it is wonderful to go back and look at what I learned and make adjustments to lessons. With some of these things in mind, once the groups had made their Forms, rather than share via email etc (this just adds a complication) we clicked on the Live Form link at the foot of the page.
So everyone had on their laptop screens their form and I asked them to simply change places with those on their table and complete each others’ surveys. They then moved around the classroom adding their responses to other forms from other groups. Although it is nice to share via email, in my experience of working with Google Forms and lots of children it is much easier to move the children rather than share the Form. The children certainly got more responses this way and contributed more, there was less in the way.
After each child had submitted their responses they clicked on the Go Back to the form link which reset the form for the next child – this worked out really well. (15 minutes)
Up to this point the children were able to appreciate how Google Forms is a great way to gather information and how it organises it for us in the spreadsheet.
Back at their own Google Form the children spent some time exploring the results Summary page to look at how their data can be represented. (5 minutes)
As a class we returned to our Edu Favourites survey of educators in my Twitter network. By the end of my second session we had over 125 responses and it was a great pool of data to explore. Real data from real people that we literally witnessed being entered. I was able to ask children lots of questions from how it was represented. It proved to be a great plenary. Here are the results from the survey, there are currently 170 responses – thankyou if you were one of them. (5 minutes)
As a final exploration of this whole process you could explore the link data. I used bit.ly to shorten the long Google Form URL. bit.ly provides traffic data, with a free account, and you can show the class where the people clicking on the form are from. Currently there have been 269 clicks on the Edu Favourites form link and here is where everyone is from.
You could even do some work on how many didn’t fill in the form and compare it to those who did.
Thankyou for taking the time to help with our maths lesson today, I am always so grateful for your contributions – and some of you have even gone away wondering what Marmite is – life will never be the same again. By the way I hate it too!
Using Voicethread for Writing Ideas and for Peer Marking
Feb 1st
In the past week or so our literacy work has focused on a short sequence from the comic Spiderman #1. Our Superheroes topic is going well and in this post I explain how we have used Voicethread as a creation tool, a writing scaffold and as a way to do peer marking.
We began with the sequence in the comic where Peter is attending a science fair at a local school and is bitten by spider that has been zapped by one of the radiation machines on show. I wanted the short 5 panel sequence to be the focus of an extended narrative. I liked the tight focus on a few moments and the action and comic imagery would really help us to write some interesting narrative.
To begin with we made some notes about the short sequence as a whole class, mainly key words, things that just jumped out from the images and from the facial expressions of Peter.
The next step was to import the five panels from the comic you can see in the above image into Voicethread. I just used a screen capture tool and created some separate image files for each. The Voicethread was to be a collection of first ideas. At this early stage of the writing process I think Voicethread plays it’s hand superbly.
The children have the opportunity to say their ideas aloud. To articulate, listen back, correct and re-articulate very easily. All of the children in the year group worked on writing and recording ideas for the Bitten! sequence and as you know they are privy to all of the comments from their peers in real time. We used the vocabulary above as a stimulus throughout this early task.
After sharing literally hundreds of narrative ideas for the sequence, the children were put with a writing partner. Often we focus on writing in solitude but I think the support and insight children can get from working together is hugely rewarding. They get to see how someone else might approach the same piece of writing.
I modelled the up-levelling or improvement of some simple starter sentences for each of the panels. We worked together as a class to extend and improve on them using the language already collected. The children used Google Docs for their work and I encouraged children to also have open the Voicethread of ideas that we had created. The 5 panels acted as 5 simple paragraph changes. In this step the children are using Voicethread as a source of ideas and as a writing scaffold. They listened and read back the comments others had left and I think found these really useful in kick-starting their work.
As we were working in Google Docs I dipped into their work as they were busy writing. I have written before about how this is less obtrusive than looking over their shoulder or taking their books off of them. I added a header to the Google Doc and then used CTRL+M to add a named and dated comment. I would back this up by a quick chat with the pair if needed to ensure they would act on my advice and feedback.
The children had of course shared their Document with me and their writing partner. In my Docs home screen I used the star label to show which Docs I had marked and which I hadn’t. You can read some more ideas for marking with Google Docs in this blog post.
As part of the writing process I explained we would be publishing some to the class blog. I wanted the feedback from the blog to be part of the improvement process for the children. I think that if you plan to publish examples of work in this way, and the kids know this before they begin, you are not just bolting it on afterwards. The children know that the blog readership will be their audience.
We were able to publish 80 percent of the work from the class, those that didn’t were just unfinished. The comments that we received were fantastic and greatly encouraging for the children involved. We would revisit these later in the process.
Although the children have a finished piece of work at this point we are only part of the way through the writing process I had planned and this is where we turned back to Voicethread again. (We kept a printed copy of this first draft.) I have often said that the use of PDFs in Voicethread is overlooked. Clearly the use of images and video is very engaging, but adding PDFs is really useful functionality.
I did two things before exporting the children’s work from Google Docs. Firstly I added their names next to the title of the work. I knew from who shared it with me who the owner was, but as a plain PDF it would be missing that. The second thing was to increase the size of the text so that it was clearly visible in Voicethread.
Voicethread allows you to zoom in to text or images, but when you need to use the pen highlighter it zooms out. With a full page PDF the writing can sometimes be too small to see. Ensuring the text size is set as high as possible is really important if you want to take advantage of the pen tool.
Once this was done I exported all of the Docs as PDFs (no need to worry about the file names as you added their names to the text already) and imported these into a new Voicethread. I noticed that some of the pages were jumbled, in other words if a piece of work was over 2 pages these pages were split. Naturally you want them next to each in Voicethread - watch out for that, however it is easy to move pages about from the upload screen.
Saying that, it is hard to see from the thumbnails which belong together – maybe that is something for Voicethread to work on. Either a magnify function on the upload page for each thumbnail or better assurance PDFs will stay in the correct order.
Once the Voicethread was ready to go I asked each pair to record an audio comment of one of them reading out their own work. This is a simple step you can take to allow all of the children in the class to access the different pieces of writing. If they struggled reading it, there was an audio version! We talked to the children about adding comments and feedback and I stuck to a simple 2 stars (things they liked) and 1 wish (something to improve) which we have used before. I encouraged them to use the pen tool to highlight words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that they were referring too and this proved very successful.
Interestingly the process of reading your own work out aloud and recording it made the children realise where they could improve their own work.
The final step was to revisit their original writing and complete the editing process. It is sometimes hard to find time to review work in light of comments but is essential in helping children improve. Those with blog comments on their work were encouraged to look at what was written. Everyone had numerous comments on their own work as part of the Voicethread - they went back to their Google Doc and made alterations and improvements based upon the feedback from me, their peers and the wider audience on the blog.
I went to every single pair and asked them to talk through some of the alterations they had made and guided them to focus on anything they had overlooked.
In short the sequence looked like this:
- Reading the focus sequence
- Gathering initial vocabulary and feedback
- Voicethread of sequence – children add ideas
- Writing begins – using above resources
- Writing is published to the class blog and uploaded to Voicethread
- Voicethread of work – children add feedback
- Edit in light of teacher, blog and peer comments
This was over the course of about a week and half to two weeks. This sort of timescale really allows you the space to establish some quality and immerse you and the class in the piece of work. After all, we were only writing about a very short moment in time.
It may have only been a few fleeting, painful moments for Peter when he was bitten, but we found this extended writing and review process really successful.
Online Reporting – On the Back Burner
Nov 26th
Unfortunately sometimes you have to be honest and admit that some ideas will remain just ideas. I have decided to step away from the online reporting project using Google Docs as I just can’t find the time I want to give it.
It is not about the validity of the idea of using Google Docs for reporting to parents it is just about time. Our first half term was a great unit of work on Sealife and just the normal routine and timetable of things took over.
Time is Running Out by zamboni.andrea
Attribution-NonCommercial License
I understand that my blog posts have suggested I was starting it this year, and although I have support from school about the concept I have had no extra time to get it started. The discussions and research over the last year have been hugely interesting as to the place of cloud computing applications in school administrative tasks. It does make me think about how schools will need to better support teachers in the new roll out of online reporting that will take place in the next few years. The processes will need to be looked at closely.
I believe Simon Widdowson (@porchester) is going forward with the idea and it will be worth following his future exploits.
For me, perhaps another year, perhaps at another school.
Using Instant Messaging to Engage Children with Reading Comprehension
Feb 25th
I recently had a great conversation with my teaching colleague Rick about the use of technology to engage children with reading comprehension. This post is about my lesson I taught today as a result of that brief yet productive talk.
Although we have been reasonably successful in addressing how we use our available technology to support the development of times table knowledge, reading comprehension has been much more elusive. This afternoon both Rick and I explored two different ideas we had, regarding the use of technology to engage and support the practice of comprehension skills.
Rick was using the Flip Cameras in his lesson, he had about 3 available to him and was looking for the children to generate their own questions about a text. After talking with a partner and drafting the question on small whiteboards they recorded the question to camera. When there were a few Rick showed these to the class and worked on modelling the answers and then setting the children off to find the answers in pairs. By all accounts an engaging way to explore text.
We have used the discuss tool in Google spreadsheets and presentation chat before to peer review presentations.
I worked with a Google Presentation and wanted to engage the children with the text through the use of the instant messaging window that is available. All of my children love using MSN and Google Talk/Chat, it is the one application that they all use very regularly. For two years now both of my Year 5 classes who have been using Google Apps discovered Google Chat in GMail by themselves and have got busy using it.
So how was this all setup? There are some things that we have in place that have helped. Firstly the children are using Google Apps for Education and have a unique login. Secondly we are working in my classroom on laptops.
- I created a presentation, which is in effect our text, in my Google account.
- I shared the presentation with the class as VIEWERS. This is important as it will mean that the children will immediately see the file in presentation mode and not in editing mode. Loading time was slow today, although once all loaded we had no other problems.
- The instant messaging window will open when they click “View with others” (Bottom right hand corner) you will see their names appear in the “VIEWING NOW” box on your own presentation.
- We then did some shared reading of the text about Spies and Gadgets. I used the “CONTROL THE PRESENTATION” tool available to me as owner of the document. As I clicked and moved through the presentation everyone’s laptops updated. This was immediate in every case, not bad for sixteen wireless laptops and proved useful for whole class work.
- Once we had a good look through the text as a class, and some initial discussion, I then explained the question answer process. I would add a question in the IM window and they needed to navigate to the correct page and respond with their answer, also in the IM window.
- As I typed I muted the projector image so kids didn’t get a head start, that was helpful.
- The children answered in the IM window and I could see their name with the response showing ownership.
You may be thinking that some children may just look at other people’s answers. I talked to the class about this and encouraged them to engage with the text themselves, nevertheless seeing their peers answers proved a valuable function of this group IM session. Children were commenting on other answers and it caused some to question their own accuracy if they saw something different.
Of course there was the odd smiley! But that is what the children do when they IM, I was kind of entering their world. It is a delicate balance. I want to harness the engagement that IM brings and yet not make it too schooly so they switch off. I ensured that when they answered anything all of our usual literacy standards applied and the class responded well to that.
We worked on about 10 questions together and all of the children were totally engaged and motivated to find the answers and use the IM to form their response. They also maintained this engagement for considerably longer then when we work with paper and pencil.
As the answers rolled in I was able to immediately give feedback to different children, asking them to look again at what they had written. One particular question about the reasons why we use tables to present information caused the children to respond about the content and not the purpose. I discussed with the whole class what the correct answer might be, gave the children the start of the sentence in the chat window and asked them to answer again.
Beyond this one lesson I think that if the children were to use the Google Talk client then we could be looking at a variety of different texts and not just something created in Google Presentation. With the chat window open and a website or film playing it would allow us even more flexibility. In fact it could work with any other type of available application.
My target in the lesson was to engage the children with reading comprehension using technology we use in our classroom. I think we did that. It is taking what the children enjoy doing and harnessing that engagement, attempting to merge and utilise the skills they use outside of school to impact on their engagement with their learning.
100 Interesting Ways
Jan 26th
In November 2007 I began the first of a series of Google presentations gathering together some ideas about the uses of different tools for the classroom. I thought that the easy manner of sharing Google Docs was ideal to collate thoughts, tips and suggestions from teachers and educators all over the world.
I began with interesting ways to use the interactive whiteboard and the family has since grown to include, tips for Google Earth, Google Docs and the most recent Pocket Video Cameras. It has been great to watch them evolve as people get in touch and I add them to the document and they make their own edits.
Here is the family photo 
My intention from the beginning was that there should be many authors of the presentations and that teachers and school staff could happily take the resource and share it with their colleagues. As it is in a simple presentation format it seems to have been successful in doing that.
In total we have collated 100 101 suggestions, tips and ideas for the classroom! (I can’t type quick enough and people keep adding more ideas!) It is fantastic to be part of that collaborative effort to share what we do.
The most recent on pocket video cameras seems to have really hit a rich vein of classroom ideas – so far 29 ideas have been shared by people all over the world and I only started it 3 days ago. I haven’t had chance to add an idea myself yet! Perhaps this wealth of ideas illustrates the power and potential of video in the classroom – which isn’t particularly new but pocket video cameras give us, and the children we work with, much easier access.
Who knows what the next 100 ideas will be about but I hope that you can be part of it – please take some time to take a look through some of them above, let me know if you have used the presentations with your staff. If you want to add an idea to any of the above presentations just let me know your email address and I will add you as an editor.
