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Posts tagged googledocs
Unobtrusive Collaboration in Google Docs
Oct 10th
We have been using Google Docs with our students for over a year now and I have spent some time writing about our experiences so far. One of the key questions that I have been exploring for a while now is “How do you mark and manage student work in Google Docs?” but this simple question is applicable to most other online office tools. In this post I explore a facet of this type of assessment that I would call “unobtrusive collaboration”.
On a number of occasions in the last year I have taken the opportunity to conduct a “live marking” session with the children in my class. They are working on a piece of work that is shared with me – I open it at the same time and add comments and marking to the piece of work. I would often also back these comments up by talking to the children involved, going over to them to reinforce what I had commented on – actively engaging them in the collaboration.
In some of these instances I would just nip into the doc and take a quick look around to check the progress, leave a comment if appropriate and leave them to it. I think this is an interesting type of quiet monitoring as the children are working. In the online document I can mark, highlight and leave comments without intruding on the flow of work that is taking place.
With paper based tasks or work that does not allow synchronous editing I would have to interrupt what the children are working on to inspect their work more closely. I might have to ask them to scroll to different sections or simply to move their writing hand so I can see what they have done over their shoulder!
Of course we must always find time to talk to our children face to face about the progress of their work, and I am not disputing the value of this, but often it does intrude on the flow of work. This sense of passive collaboration offers us the opportunity to access all of the children’s work very quickly and to quietly monitor progress and to add our comments.
I think that this sort of unobtrusive marking or monitoring is especially useful when my children are working in a small group or a pair. They are often busy talking about what they are doing or about to move onto and I do not want to stop that communication, or break their train of thought. Last Wednesday I quietly added comments and thoughts to my class as they were busy working in pairs on an activity in Religious Education. They picked up on those comments, adjusted their work, responded if they needed to, but it essentially did not halt the immediate process – it was a tacit collaboration.
What experiences have you had of marking and managing the ongoing assessment of work in Google Docs or other online office tools with your students?
Related posts:
- 10 Google Forms for the Classroom
- So can I use Google Docs at home?
- Marking work in Google Docs
- Creating an emotion graph using Google forms
- It’s about the communication, not the tool
- Tips for introducing online collaboration to students
Image: ‘a perfect circle‘
Fruity Forms
Sep 20th
This week we used Google Forms to collect and share preference data about fruit. We spent Wednesday afternoon’s design and technology session learning about different fruit as a precursor to creating a healthy fruit smoothie.
The children had the opportunity to taste about 15 different types of fruit and record their thoughts and preferences. I used a Google Form to collect this data into a spreadsheet so that the children could use this information to help inform them of their peers’ preferences. That is why this was so useful, the form acted as a simple data entry point to contribute to a wider pool of data. This larger set provides the children an insight into the a wider range of preferences which we will use to help plan the ingredients for their smoothies.
We are working in Google Apps for Education and there are a number of ways to share both the form and the spreadsheet, in the screenshots below I explain some of them because there are a few different options.
I used this feature when I shared the fruit form with my class. They accessed it from their email and the form was included in the message. However be aware that when the children completed the form and clicked submit from the email message ironically the Google toolbar blocked the pop-up that opens as conformation. The form data is not submitted.
In order to sidestep this quickly during the lesson without having to ask the children to edit pop-up settings I asked them to access the form via the link that is included in the email. In the future I will just send the link to the kids and get them to access it outside of their email.
Remember that the form and the spreadsheet can be shared separately – once we have collated all of the data we need, I will be sharing the children into the document so they can access the results. I displayed the spreadsheet data on the IWB so the children could see what was happening I highlighted the live update of the data as forms were submitted.
This final option to share the form will allow children access to it from their documents home screen. We had great fun sharing the fruit preferences we had by using Google Forms and we will soon be all set to average out the data to help with our smoothie recipes.
With a week passing since we began using our docs accounts the kids have experienced the use of sharing and working on documents, forms and spreadsheets – on Friday the children worked in pairs on a piece of work in RE, shared with each other as the pair were co-owners and then handed into me by sharing too. I showed the children how I star the documents that I need to mark and how to filter their docs home view in different ways. It is still enjoyable to see children sharing Google Docs to hand work in, it is just so simple and effective.
Important to note the pop-up problem if you share the form embedded in an email – next time I will probably use option 3 rather than email.
Related posts:
So can I use Google Docs at home?
Sep 15th
Absolutely. One of the children in my class had waited to the end of the session to ask me if they could access Google Docs at home. This afternoon we introduced all of our Year 5 children (60) to Google Apps and we had lots of fun exploring the tool with our new classes.
We discussed with the children the make-up of their usernames and then the syntax of their email. I use a little information sheet (see above) for them to record their data on, I asked the children to come out to me and I tell them and write down their password. Simple and effective.
Please use this document to support your own introduction to Google Apps in the classroom.
With the laptops already running back at their tables they then go and login. (It is worth noting that they also have to go through some security questions before they access their Docs home.) As we had last year we had the usual problems of not typing things in correctly but otherwise the children all managed it well.
I decided that a simple data entry spreadsheet would be one of the best ways to introduce the idea of sharing a document. I created something that would accommodate the results we have collected during our circuit training in PE, number of repetitions in a minute for steps ups and star jumps, that sort of thing (see the header in the film clip). Once I created the document I shared with all of the children in our year group, this way when they login they will see a document in the home screen.
All the children had to do in this intro activity was to find their name and add their data they had recorded on paper to the shared resource. Just before they began I asked the children to try to imagine what it would be like if I asked every child in the class to record their data on one sheet of paper – their bemused looks helped me to emphasise the power of working in an online document and how we can all access it at the same time.
We began to explore the spreadsheet and as we opened it we could see that the other Year 5 class were well on their way in terms of adding their data. Again I took this opportunity to help illustrate the live update of the document and how the different coloured cell outlines signalled different users (Incidentally if you roll over these coloured cells you will see the username pop up) I asked one of the children in my class to enter their own data and we watched as it updated on the class IWB and all 16 laptops looking on. The children’s excitement was building, similar to the moment when they realise what all the fuss is about in a Voicethread.
This short screencast shows our spreadsheet being updated – a pretty dull video but useful to illustrate how it looks when being worked on by 16 users.
The children were buzzing by now and I felt we could push them on to learning about how you share a document, so once I had shown them how to do it I challenged them to create something and share it with me. I displayed my inbox on the screen and watched as the message alerts came rolling in. I realised the children loved to see this, they got so excited to see their email alert pop into my inbox – before their friend had managed it! I remember this being the case last year. I am going to explore the idea of incidental writing opportunities using email this year.
I showed the children GMail and asked them to send me an email and once again they were very adept at what they were doing, highly accustomed to it all already and were clearly enjoying it. I once again observed, even in this first session, the community of use that appears – children helping each other out, a supportive word, children asking their friends. And of course children empowered to be a mini-expert.
We have gotten off to a flying start and this week I have declared it a sandbox week, in that the children can email me and share any documents they create, a time to play and get used to this great set of tools. At the end of the week we will rein in this activity a little and discuss some simple guidelines for sharing docs.
Last year we only had about 7 weeks of work with Google Docs, today it begun in our classes and I am really looking forward to digging even deeper into what we can do with the tools to support learning in the primary classroom. And we have a got a whole year to dig!
Who knows what we will find?
Some related posts from this blog that you might find useful too.
- “Google Apps in School - Week 1 , Week 2 , Week 3 , Week 4 , Weeks 5+6“
- 11 Google Apps improvements for the classroom
- 10 Google Forms for the Classroom
- What my class thought of our Google Docs project
- Peer feedback using the chat feature in Google Presentations
- Marking work in Google Docs
- Creating an emotion graph using Google forms
- Using the “Discuss” tool in Google spreadsheets
- iFrame Goodness: Embedding Google presentations
- Using Google Forms in the classroom
Peer feedback using the chat feature in Google Presentations
Jul 14th
Other relevant posts:
- Google Apps in School – Week 1 , Week 2 , Week 3 , Week 4 , Weeks 5+6
- Creating an emotion graph using Google forms
- Marking work in Google Docs
iFrame Goodness: Embedding Google presentations
Mar 17th
I was pleased to discover that Edublogs now has the functionality to embed iframe, javacript and most object code into blog posts and sidebars. Below I have embedded the two different Google presentations on sharing good practice in Google Earth and using the IWB.
If you would like to contribute to the ongoing development of these two presentations just let me know you have a tip to share.
In order to embed a Google presentation into a post, like I have done above, just follow the screenshots.
If you have any other ways you have used javascript, iframes code etc in your Edublogs let James and the rest of the community know.
