Week 3: Literature Review: 32 Ways to Use Google Apps in the Classroom

For my Literature Review I have just finished watching a wonderfully informative webinar under Google Apps for Education, titled, 32 Ways to Use Google Apps in the Classroom.  Julia Stiglitz, a former fourth grade teacher and now presently works for Google on the Google Apps for Education Team.Webinar Video 

For this webinar Julia encapsulated some of the most popular tools Google has that can make teaching in the twenty first century not only more efficient but more engaging for our students.  From using Google Calendar that a teacher could use to invite parents, colleagues, and students to view, to a Homework Tracking Document for parents to see what their child is or not keeping up with in their homework, Google has made collaborating and sharing important information easy and efficient.  Using the calendar a teacher can see when you have a plan period and schedule a meeting, or hop in on another meeting that they may want some insight on about a student.  With a shared Google calendar no more can a colleague or administrator feel that they have been left out of the loop.  When using the Homework tracker a teacher can share information with her parents and students ethically about the progress of their child.  By assigning numbers to each child and then sharing privately that number with the child’s parents, they can easily track their Childs homework practices.  This helps with teacher to parent communication while also being very efficient with your time. Instead of answering to 20 emails or making 5 phone calls with students having trouble handing in their homework a teacher can now share that information in real time.Tracking Homework Sheet

Google Apps has made it very easy to evaluate and use a variety of current technologies to enhance content instruction and to advance students' technological literacy by giving us Apps that are very practical while also engaging to the student while helping promote their learning.  A few of the more notable ways that a teacher can use Google Apps to make their classrooms more efficient while making them more technologically inclusive are as follows.  A teacher can make their own Formative/ Summative assessments to gage their students on what they already may know on a subject they are about to learn about and have the students take the quick assessment right their on their laptops and get the results in seconds.  There is a Flash Card App under the Gadgets tab that allows for teachers to make and administer Flash cards of their own making, a great tool for me as English language Learner teacher.  Also with Reading Response Journal Work a teacher can completely replace lugging around 25 Composition notebooks to correct, by making it an online experience through Google Docs.  With this App a teacher can have students collaborate on writing assignments, or submit journal responses through their computers, and with Revision History (a feature included on Google Docs) all the students revisions are saved so a teacher can track progress or pull out “gems” of information the students has left out in a revision that the teacher felt should be included.

This webinar and Google was very applicable to the work I plan to do as an ELL instructor due to the many features it had.  From Document translating to help me better communicate with my non-English speaking parents and students, to the invite feature from Gmail allowing me to invite guest speakers from around the world or even just the grandparents of our students to our class with live chat to share about different cultures.  With Google Docs I can create and share a classroom webpage complete with a calendar of events, to help my students create Digital Portfolios to share their work and progress with future teachers.  I am so glad I chose this specific webinar and definitely plan to explore and learn more about how to use the different Apps and how to include its information in my class.