I had the advantage of going to a Google for Educators workshop last spring, so I am vaguely familiar with some of the tools Google has (I am still crossing my fingers for Google Earth to not be so huge and "work" on our systems; I'm dying to see and use the Kite Runner lit. trip). While at the workshop I decided two things: 1. Google has a lot of cool things to start integrating into the classroom. 2. I think it would be AWESOME to work there. Ok, there is a third but this is the conspiracy theorist talking: What the heck is Google doing with all this information? Is it going to be Feed???
Coming back from conspiracy-theory crazy and staying on-task, I have created several docs, presentations, spreadsheets, and forms in Google and have used them in my classroom. As a result, I am going to "share" some with you that you may want to take a look at. Please comment, use, modify (please remember to save it somewhere OTHER than my original), improve. If you like what you see but there are some weird permission things in the way, let me know and I will share them with you (if I like you).
Class evaluation- document. Final survey for students to let me know how I did, what they liked about the class, what they suggest I change for next year. I have learned to take this with a grain of salt BUT the really good, insightful comments and suggestions are just good enough that it makes me keep handing this out.
Independent reading tracker - English/Reading and some English teachers assign independent reading as part of the class. We can have a whole discussion on whether or not that should be happening later, but for now here is a tracker I thought might help us keep students accountable and still hold them to a high standard (you can't double dip, junior! I know you did that for...). Also, this can be updated yearly in real time by all the teachers at once if necessary. Downside: time. I know.
GRAD result student tracker- Data, data, data. Eng/Read 11 and 12 are constantly trying to track all the data we get. This spreadsheet is something we print out and keep on every student. Now, we just have to figure out how to keep using this data to teach ;)
I hope I haven't screwed all this up and allowed editing when I didn't want to allow editing. Here's to crossing your fingers and hoping the cosmos out there stay in check!
I'm not completely sold on Google Docs yet. My students get frustrated because printing is different and sometimes what they see on the screen isn't how it prints. I like Google presentation. It is simple and straightforward. I found that navigating between using Firefox and IE worked GREAT. I have to remember that for future use.
Also, shout out to all PC peeps. I thought I had my apps email account forwarding to school email but I just went in to recheck and it wasn't. I would recommend checking in on that again if, like me, you abandoned ship and just went with the fact you didn't think it would work in the past.
