Is there a teacher who hasn't used Google in some way? I don't think so. I think everyone knows how to use Google Drive and has used Google Docs. Everyone knows how to use it, but today I'm talking about how I've used it in my classroom. I have been using Google for pretty much everything since freshman year of college. I say pretty much everything because I did use Microsoft Word for my class newsletter template and some signs for my classroom. I'm fortunate that I learned to use Google Drive at the beginning of college so I had no problem transitioning to student teaching and then teaching in a GAFE district where students had personal gmail accounts from the time they enter kindergarten to their graduation. In college, I used it to type term papers (I never dealt with a computer crashing and if I had, my documents would have been safe), sorority meeting minutes, suggested that we use Google forms for our master recruitment list when I was my sorority's recruitment chair and Greek Council rep in 2010 (they still do that), maintained a personal style blog and so much more . When I was at ISTE at the end of June, a woman told me that she was not part of a GAFE district. I cringed; I couldn't imagine my life without Google. I'm always learning cool things that I can do through my Gmail account. This is just part one of a series of posts and today I'm starting with the simplest thing a teacher can use Google Drive for.
One way that I use Google Drive/Docs is for lesson planning. I learned this from my mentor teacher student teaching and kept the format when I moved into my own classroom. I love Google Docs because it's easy to collaborate with others. Perfect for co-planning with other teachers. I was told that I could upload lesson plans through Eduphoria, but that was confusing. I stuck with Google. It's easy. I created my template (I had one for sixth grade language arts and then created one for second/first grade) and now,I just have make a copy of the document each week and plug in my lesson plans. When I taught sixth grade ELA, this allowed me to work on lesson plans several weeks down the road as I planned writing project due dates, computer lab days, special events and end of nine weeks assessments. Being the only teacher who taught 6th grade writing definitely had its perks when lesson planning. Whenever I finished my plans, I printed out three copies--one for my lesson plan binder (I love tech but I have to write things down and have hard copies sometime), one for my sub binder and then one to turn in to administration.
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| My lesson planning template. |
I also taught my sixth graders how to use Google Drive and having learned about Google Classroom at iPadpalooza in 2015, I can't wait to use that at my school. One was blown away that multiple people could edit the same document at the same time. I had his work open on my computer adding comments while he worked on his assignment at the back of the room. Google Docs is a great tool for students to collaborate with. We used it a lot for typing personal narratives and other essays and I also used it for instructional purposes such as showing writing examples and revising them as a large group, typing class notes and generating lists. At the end of the year, I was working on my favorite project--a Thinglink presentation about a country they researched--and I decided that they would use Google Docs to create their Works Cited pages. While this project was going on, I discovered that if the students made their works cited page public they could embed their document into their Thinglink presentation. They had to also share their works cited page with me if they didn't embed it.
As an upper elementary teacher, I noticed that some sixth graders tend to lose assignments. I'm also not a textbook and workbook teacher (I used our book for my own content knowledge development) and prefer to create my own assessments as much as possible. I always made these original assignments in Google docs. Not having iPads or laptops every day, I had to give my students hard copy assignments if we weren't taking notes or working on a final draft. Being able to share these documents with students (if they lost theirs) and then having them make a copy in their Google Drive was a life saver for the students who lost assignments.
Go Google.
-Elle
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