3 Ways Google Applications can enhance teaching

by Richard Bradshaw

Having recently started working at a school where email, calendars, documents etc are hosted by Google Applications, I felt that it would be worth while incorporating these into my teaching and planning. This post describes the benefits I have found from this in the first few weeks, and will outline some plans that I have for the future. If you haven’t used Google Applications in a workplace before, then here’s a quick outline of what’s included in the free version.

  • Gmail (7+ GB of storage)
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Documents
  • Google Sites
  • Google Talk
  • A version of iGoogle called Start Page

The benefit of this straight away is that I can access my email anywhere, either through the web version or using IMAP. The school offers the main calendar in Google Calendar, so I can subscribe to it in any modern software as it uses a standard format. Google Talk lets me see who is avaliable through Gmail’s interface. Google Sites lets non-developers produce dynamic sites which can include blogs, videos etc in an very simple way. The start page lets me check my calendar, email from a central location.
So, having explained what’s included, how can it change the way you teach?

1. Online presentations

I’ve been solely using Google Documents for all my planning and presentations in lessons for 4 reasons: I can edit them and show them anywhere on any computer, share them with pupils and staff with a couple of clicks, embed them in our Moodle site and best of all, embed Youtube videos into the presentations. I tend to use Youtube a lot when teaching as I prefer to show short snappy clips rather than 30-40 minute long videos.

Google Presentations is directly connected to Youtube and allows a simple way to add videos simply by searching within the dialog box.

This stops me constantly flicking between Powerpoint or OpenOffice to Firefox every few minutes and makes for a smoother delivery when teaching.

Again, being able to do this means that I can easily publish lesson in Moodle that are easily viewable.

2. Collaborative Editing

All documents in Google Documents allow editing my multiple users at the same time. This is great for setting pupils group projects (create a presentation, write an essay, do an experiment together) as well as sharing documents such as class lists, long term plans, rotas etc with staff.

One particularly good use for this is allowing a class of pupils to add their results in science to a spreadsheet in real time. I haven’t tried this yet, but will do soon. This will allow analysis of a larger data set, as well as ensuring that all pupils complete the work.

3. Forms

Google Spreadsheets has a nice feature called forms. Basically this lets you send out questionnaires to people. When they respond, the results are available in a spreadsheet. Simple, yet very effective.

This could be added to the ideas above if pupils are not able to fill out a spreadsheet correctly.

Conclusion

As you can see, these tools allow you do so much more than a standard desktop office application – they really have enabled me to do much more on the IT side of things than I have previously.

Do you have any other ideas? Let me know in the comments!

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