To make best use of an inset day, Tom and headed up to Auckland for a 1 day workshop on Google Tools presented by Mark Osbourne. Started off with an overview of the basic features of Google Drive and the ways in which sharing and commenting can be used to enhance student learning. He made a good point that “we often forget how hard it is to do something if we are not good at it”.
He highlighted some work from John Hattie about things that make a difference in a classroom – feedback and co-opertative learning. One idea that we could implement in the inquiry programme is to have students share their draft report with another student and spend one lesson on peer editing using the commenting feature of Google Docs.
One activity that Hattie has identified as being useful in reciprocal teaching. I had the idea to use this in teaching metals to my mainstream science class. Here’s a brief plan:
1. Allocate an alloy to a group (2-3), create one document that they share
2. Group complete a description of alloy (image, properties)
3. Swap ‘alloys’ (re-share the document) and next group completes ‘Uses’
4. Swap ‘alloys’ (re-share the document agin) and next group completes ‘Innovative use in an interesting context’
5. Swap ‘alloys’ again, summarise the document an put into one slide on a presentation that is shared with the whole class.
Another idea is to create one document to share with both inquiry classes that includes short cut keys to make students more efficient users of their machine.
Teaching search was another them we touched on. There is more to search than just Google. Some strategies are to introduce students to other search tools such as Google Scholar, Google Books, Social Booking marking (Delicious, BibMe), or dedicated research databases such as Epic. One task, as well as the Google a Day challenge is Googlewhacking.
Random notes:
Google takeout enables you to download all your files from a Google account to move to a new account.
Google Plus: Hangout is a live video feed. Plus share a document. Plus screenshare. Plus Screen capture. Wow. Will it take over the organising and sharing role of Moodle?
Quizlet: web based tool for quizes.
MyPortfolio: This is a web based tool for aggregating content that students have completed. You can embedded Google Drive content so the student can provide evidence for a particular sections (such as an Achievement Standard). Teachers and others can comment on the students work. In four short words: Collect, Select, Reflect, Connect.
