Using Google Docs - GTAUK part 6

Today I went back into school for the first time this new school year.  I didn't actually have to go to work, but I wanted to chat to our network manager about using Google Apps in the classroom.  I'm hoping we can get over the bandwidth issues, so that we can try some of these apps with a couple of different grades.

As well as this, I also started to work through some of the different activities and presentations that took place during the Google Teacher Academy last month.  As one of the other participants said, we were introduced to new ideas every few seconds and it was quite hard to keep up with everything.  For me, the best way to learn something new is to play with it, so this afternoon I started to look at the presentation by Zoe Ross on Google Docs.  Zoe had come up with several activities for us to work on in small groups, unfortunately our group ran out of time so I wanted to go back and try them all out again.  She had an activity using Doodle for Google, one that involved making a presentation about London landmarks and one that involved adding favourites into a spreadsheet.  This afternoon I had a good play around with these trying out lots of different features until I felt confident with them.

Zoe had provided us with several useful links and classroom examples, one of which was Tom Barrett's presentation (below).  Tom was another of the Lead Learners at GTAUK.  I can already see how I can use some of these ideas, for example the spreadsheet about pulse rate data.  Last year I worked with the PE teacher and the Grade 2s during their Who We Are unit of inquiry to measure the students' pulse when resting and following various types of activities, which we then graphed.  Each student was only able to graph his or her own data, and I can see how great it would be to actually graph the results of the whole class by having them collaborate on just one spreadsheet.  Another idea I would like to use is #10, the backchannel, using the chat window during presentations.



Later in the day I attended another session by Tom Barrett on using Google Maps.  I have been playing around with that too and will be blogging again later on ideas for using that with our students.

Image Credit:  9/13 Roald Dahl's Birthday by bangdoll@flickr