DocStickers are based on Google Keep which I had heard mention of, but not used. That led me to read 10 ways Google Keep can help streamline life at school. I am definitely interested in this tool. I also checked out Using Google Keep for Grading Comments in Docs which is from the Control Alt Achieve blog. (I have been to this blog before and Eric Curts really seems to have a lot of valuable posts on it.) I am going to email one of the HS English teachers to be sure that she knows about Google Keep for Grading Comments as I know she likes to comment on or mark papers on her tablet at home.
I had already decided to check out Spreadsheet Activities for all Subjects which is from the same blog. It mentioned Flippity which I already posted on, but also has Random Generators, too. Flippity has a random student generator tool, but you have to publish your spreadsheet to the web and hence to the world to do it. I just worry about putting student names out there. Obviously every John doesn't matter so long as you don't add last names, but there are students with much more unique names in school too and since parents are now saying that they don't even want us to take a picture of their child much less publish them to the web, I don't want to be in a sticky situation. Since the students already have Google accounts through the district, using a Random Generator on Google Drive is not creating any more vulnerability.
I decided to check out How
to Create an ebook with Google Slides because I wondered it I could share student work that way. I would love to post some of the research
projects that my students have been creating on my website. Here is the link to a sample eBook I made
with Google Slides. It explains some of
my thinking: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_iZ01XNkU1RnF0Y2s/view?usp=sharing
I have finally really used Google Classroom with my students. I always have
big plans, but I guess I was concerned about the roll-out of it. I used it with my fifth graders to create the
citation pages for their ecosystem inquiry projects. I made a template though it wasn’t quite
right because it didn’t say where they were to place their copy. I have to do some more reading on this before
next year, but I think that I will try to use Google Classroom more. It certainly was easier in some ways than my
guided citation lessons. I wrote the
descriptions of how to do each step into the template (then told them to erase
the directions when they were done) so that if they failed to listen +/or watch
as I demonstrated on the SMARTboard, they still had a fallback. Not that any of
my students would ever daydream. 😃
I also really got into using suggesting and commenting on Google Docs this
spring. I had my second and third
graders type their projects into Google Docs.
Then, I went through each one suggesting the convention corrections
(spelling, punctuation, grammar) and commenting on missing information (topic
sentences, concluding sentences, details, etc.) All in all it was pretty
successful, though an awful lot of work. The link to Google
Classroom: Pull Student Paragraphs and Give Feedback caught my eye.
I will want to look at it again, but I don’t think it will work for
these second and third graders as it doesn’t show them where the problem
is. The feedback is just put at the top
of their doc.
A detour was prompted by a quick check of
What’s
New in Google
led me to another post Create
Cloze Reading Activities with Google Sheets and Other Tools. I used his first suggestion, http://l.georges.online.fr/tools/cloze.html,
to make a Cloze activity. You can see it
here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15skb4kXOpIi4ccd4Kao1g9cnmXsr8ptwyGlxp0kGSmg/edit?usp=sharing
This seems to be a great tool for teachers as you can choose every nth word,
articles, prepositions, wh- words, and more OR you can choose your own words to
eliminate. These could be your target
spelling/vocabulary words of the week. The
Google Sheet Template he offers does not seem as good because you have to
specify the number word you want to delete, such as every 8th word.
I know I am jumping around a little, but an incident at school really got
me worrying about security with Google Drive.
Not that I am keeping anything personally valuable there, but as a
school we are sharing more student data via Google Drive for RtI and DDI
purposes, for example. We know that
there was some sort of error in sharing at school and it seems like it would be
SOOOO easy to click the wrong name when you are sharing if you are at all
distracted (which for me is any time before 4 pm as everyone and there brother
comes into the library to ask me for help!) I did decide to create two big
folders for my school Drive account: Student and Teacher with the teacher
folder being view only at the get-go, but I am sure that there must be a better
way to go about this. I asked the IT
guys to explore/create Google groups in the hopes that we could somehow
restrict access to things via Google group (Student, Teacher, etc.), but that
won’t help for a while –if they get to it at all. Does anyone have any advice
on where to learn more about this? I
will post on the discussion board as well.
A quick search led me to 4 Important
Google Drive Skills for Teachers to Learn by @LauraCallisen She made the following
suggestions:
- Make sure your Google account is secure and that you use a strong password. It is also a good idea to set any devices that you may use to access the Google account you use as teacher to not save passwords.
- If you have documents that are for your eyes only, keep them on Google drive folders that you do not share.
- Create multiple folders for different users and different purposes. Don’t try to put everything in or two places and hope that you’ve secured things correctly. A general rule of thumb is that if you allow someone access to a folder, you should assume they will be able to access all of the documents within that folder.
- Create groups so that you do not have to set permissions on an individual level
- Finally, select permissions by selecting the folder, clicking into the share button and then setting permissions.
A lot of that went along with what I was
already thinking.
I also checked out 10
Tips for Folders in Google Drive.
Although it didn’t really give me any good ideas, it is a good source of
info about how to use Google Drive, organize it, and change permissions.
Well, all in all, I think this Thing gave me a lot to work with.
Wowza!! You did SOOO much for this lesson. Thanks for all the info you shared. I'm going to try to run this workshop on Google Classroom next year, so I'll be looking back at your tips. :)
ReplyDeleteps - in your example ebook, you wondered about sharing younger students google docs work. Could you do screenshots of their work and then add those screenshots as images on a slide? Just a thought.
ReplyDelete