We love using Google Apps for Education. Google Docs is an incredible tool for the classroom.
Here are some things we love:
- Set up Google Apps for Education for your school and it’s easy to create and manage student accounts.
- The coolest part about Google Docs is how well it handles student collaboration. Students can share a document with other people in their group. and everyone can edit the same document at the same time.
- Improve parent communication. Parents want to see what their child is doing? Just share the document with them.
- Track down cyber-vandalism or see who is doing all of the work. You can see the revision history to find out who typed what. Inappropriate comment? You can track that down. Did the partners divide the work evenly? Find out.
- Stop lugging home piles of paperwork – Go digital. When students are done their work, they can share the document with you, the teacher. Now you don’t have to bring home stacks of assignments because it’s all digital. in the cloud.
- Give immediate feedback to your students. Marking in Google Docs allows you to give immediate feedback. Ever mark an assignment and have it sit in a pile on your desk waiting. The moment you mark an assignment, students can see your comments right away.
- It’s simple to use. ‘Nuff said.
- Suspend student accounts. Have students misused their time in the lab? Need to remove computer privileges? Click of a button.
I’m a college teacher and Google Apps have been very helpful to me.
I would like to put some quiz questions on my website for the students to do at home. I have set up a quiz using Google docs, but when the student gets the wrong answer there is no immediate feedback. I really would like to use this for a study guide and give feedback as the student answers the question. I understand that if you are taking it for a grade you would not want to give them the correct answer
Hi Gray, you’re right. We haven’t found a way for Google Docs to give an automated response to students to let them know if they’re right or wrong as they complete the quiz. When I wrote about immediate feedback, I was talking about how if a teacher (or student) writes a comment in their google doc, they can see it right away (instead of waiting for you to hand back the assignment.)
Out of curiosity, are you using a Google Form to collect answers on your student quiz? You could use formulas to automatically mark the quiz (like this: http://www.robinstechtips.com/?p=394) but it wouldn’t be automatic as students answered each question. You can see it in action here (http://sites.google.com/site/cuegli/events/2009-10-15/docs) but you’ll see that as you complete the quiz, you don’t get immediate feedback if you’re right or wrong.
We <3 Google Apps too! I've setup our 8th graders to use it. Each has their own email account – I've limited their access to our domain. They can communicate with their teachers via chat and email. Makes it easy for them to ask questions about an assignment, grade, etc. Also makes it easy for teachers to send out reminders, "Don't forget we have a quiz tomorrow!" I've even had my 8th graders create their own webpages under Google Sites. They love Google Apps so much that when they are home sick, they will "pop in" via chat during my class just to see what we are working on. They get their instructions/assignments and work from home. NOW THAT'S AMAZING!
Hey Amy – thanks for sharing. How do you find students are with chat? We’ve disabled chat on our Google apps, but of course, students can still ‘chat’ with each other by creating a shared Google Doc (or using the commenting / discussion feature) – How do you keep students on track in class / How do you prevent cyber bullying through chatting using Google apps? Of course, teachers can always walk around to make sure students are on task, but with great power, comes great responsibility, and a lot of colleagues are nervous about having an online environment like Google docs where students can pass notes electronically. (For example, most teachers wouldn’t let their grade 8 students text each other on their phones, but Google docs essentially lets you do that.) What are your thoughts? Cheers, Kisu