Online Projects on Googlesites – Part Two Glorious Googledocs

The Glories of Googledocs

It is the middle of the spring break. My students were supposed to have completed their blogs by now.  However after realizing that most of them had not, I pulled them in for a mini-marathon session. I brought them into our English Learning Center, gave them a quick review of what they were supposed to have included in their project, plugged them into the laptops and told them to get on with it.

The research paper, itself, had been written in Googledocs. It has been a fantastic way of doing process writing. The umbrella topic was “Customs and Beliefs”. Each pair embraced an area that could be considered as falling under this umbrella topic, and devised a research question, querying a connection or relationship or influence of one aspect of the research question, upon the other. From within the research question, each one of the pair had their specific focus. For example, a pair who did their research question on “What was the influence of the Rastafarian beliefs on Bob Marley’s music?” divided the work between them, with one of them researching Bob Marley’s music, while the other investigated Rastafarian beliefs. They then had to draw conclusions by reading each other’s research. They wrote all of their work in one Googledoc, which was shared with me. As they forged ahead with their undertakings, I was able to access their docs, write comments, suggest  ways to clarify, improve, correct spelling and grammar.

 

Thanks to Googledocs, nothing got lost; it all gets saved automatically in their Googledoc within their Google Drive. If they made a mistake, they went back in time and looked at the history.  From within the Googledoc history, they could either reconstruct where things had gone amiss, or just completely revert to an earlier version.  Magic!

In the past, when doing a project like this, I used to to collect reams of summaries and drafts each session, review them at home, write my comments, and give the pages back to them at the next lesson. By doing it all online, in Googledocs, I have the capability of accessing the projects-in-progress any time I want. I annotate the Docs, and then send the students an email telling them that I had written critiques; inviting them to go back in and work revise accordingly.

Unfortunately (as also happens in other modes of project work, when you “set them loose” in the library, not all of them use their time wisely. Hence – we find ourselves in the middle of April and not everyone has finished their project.

Back up the truck!

Of course, all of the students had an automatic, inborn understanding of what Googledocs were and how they are used. 

NOT! 

Prior to embarking on the research project, as an “enabling” exercise to teach the students how to work on a collaborative document, we did a round-robin activity. We had just finished learning a story which we had described as being a modern day fairy tale. I defined a modern day fairy tale as being a fairy tale that has the aspects of a traditional fairy tale (good vs. wicked, magical creatures or enchanted aspects, fairy godmothers, etc.) however the story was set in a contemporary environment. The kids were then all taught how to open a Googledoc (of course, at the beginning of the year, at the same time that I told them what school supplies they would need,  I instructed them to open a Gmail account).

The class was then given approximately 10 minutes to begin composing their "modern-day fairy tales". After 10 minutes, they were instructed to share their documents with three other students. The other students had to pick up the tales from where the previous writers had left off. They ALL had to share their fairy tales with me.

A view of the Fairy Tales in my Drive

And thus, they all became acquainted with the wonders of collaborative writing through the glorious tool which is  Googledocs..... and we all worked happily ever after.  

The End.

Note: Embedded, above, are two tutorials which I made for different purposes, but since they teach how to open and share a Googledoc, I used them to teach my students how to do so for our project, if they were absent on the day I taught it in class (or just as a reminder). 

Online Projects with Googlesites Part One

Rebooting April 2014

Any one of the five people (and that's an optimistic estimate) who perused my last post, way back in October, read that I had promised to be more active and consistent with my blogs. Well I am rebooting once again, however now, I am steeled with oodles of inspiration. First of all, are some truly exceptional blogging colleagues (+Yair Farby and +Efrat Maatouk) as well as the urging of someone whom I consider a mentor (+Aviv Tzemach), who has stated that part of the job description of a counselor for teachers in digital pedagogy, includes running a blog.  To top it all off, was the timely appearance of +Jules Taggart and her “Blog Revival Challenge”, in which I am participating this week. The “Challenge” promises to turn my blog content from "blah" to brilliant in 7-days.  So…as a result of the “Challenge”, I have revamped the look of the blog slightly, changed the name to “Digitally Yours” and have now officially declared thesaurus.com as my best friend, to give my verbs (and adjectives, and probably nouns, as well) some “oomph”.

In my last blog, eons ago, I wrote about my intention to do an online research project with my 10^th graders, using a Googlesites Template. So now, 6 months on, I can report on how that has been going. Since I do not want this blog to be agonizingly long, I will break it into a few blog postings. For now, I will just bring you up to scratch on where we are as of Passover break.

Although we finished working on the projects in our lessons in February, in order to move on to other curricular endeavors, most of the students have not completely finished their projects.  Not that it would have necessarily been different if the projects had been done in the usual tree-killing printed-out-on-paper mode, but there HAVE been some aspects of the online project which has made it more challenging than previously, among them, the issues of keeping track (for both myself and my students).  

To start out, my colleague Lily and I devised what we wanted to see in the quintessential project website, and prepared a basic template. The role of the template was to enable the students to simply copy the template, with all the required webpages.  Based on that, the students were expected to design, decorate and in short: take responsibility and ownership of their  websites for their projects.

We invested considerable time and thought into what we expected the projects to look like, and I built a template on Googlesites. A few days before presenting the concept to our students, I approached the task of  preparing short tutorial webcasts to teach the students how to copy and edit their sites,  filled with the anticipation and excitement of doing something new and inspiring. Then came the sucker-punch.  To my horror,  I realized that I was locked out of my template! After a few hours of frantic emails back and forth between my Google-savvy colleagues, and fruitless attempts at catching the attention of anyone of import at Google, itself, I caved. I reconstructed what I had envisioned for the template, and saved it as a model site, while at the same time screencasting the procedure as I built it.

I believe I can honestly say that, putting aside the initial mortification of having been exiled my own house; of having something I had developed unceremoniously hijacked from under my nose and within my realm of cyberspace, in the end….. I probably gained more than I lost. Because the bottom line is that, not only did my students learn how to do a research project; they also gained the experience of actually building a website.

Easy it wasn’t. But I believe that at least a few of them feel pride in having learned how to build a website that they can show to others. And when their time comes, in two years, to present their projects for their oral matriculations, I do not expect to hear the excuse that their mother threw out their project… or that the dog ate it.

Digitally yours, 
@dele

P.S. Below is an example of one of the tutorials I produced for the purposes of teaching the students how to build a website. They can all be found on my class site: AdeleEFL. 

Blogging about blogger!

We have just completed the final session in a series of webinars about using Googletools in the classroom. Blogger is a tool that I have been drawn to for a long time (as you can see my sporadic blogging attempts from the past) but have not yet really made "friends" with. I think it might have something to do with "commitment issues" ...I am committed to so many things, that committing to a blog has been scaring me off. But maybe the summer is the perfect time to conquer them.

Most exciting is that I am looking for a tool to use with my students for working on a portfolio for a project - and I believe that blogger might be a good tool for the process part of the portfolio. I will try to work it out, while brainstorming with colleagues - in person as well as on Facebook. Will keep you posted!