Google Apps for Education has brought some amazing tools to Garfield School District, to the SEDC region, and to all that use this service around the US. I’m constantly finding new ways that these tools can and should be used in the classroom to make both teachers and students life easier. If I were to share them all with you, it would take much more than the time that we have allotted today, so I’ll try to highlight 10 of my favorite uses or applications that you have access to simply by logging into your school email account.
Before I begin, however, I’d like to direct you to an amazing resource that will help guide our time today, and will be a valuable resource after – the Google Apps Education Training Center. Whatever you’d like to learn how to do in Google Apps: Gmail, Calendar, Docs Sites, or some of their other tools, this site has easy to follow instructions and training modules that will help you learn how in just a few minutes.
Now, let’s go to the Top Ten List!
- Gmail: Creating contact groups for parents, classes, teachers, & organizations
- Gmail: Built in Chat using text, voice – even video!
- Calendar: Creating different calendars for classes, projects and school activities
- Calendar: Sharing your calendars as a web page
- Docs: Manage documents with multiple editors, up to 50 simultaneous editors/collaborators, adding and replying to comments
- Docs: Improving the writing process with feedback and revision, tracking progress, and publishing work
- Presentations: Collaborative presentations that student groups create from your template
- Spreadsheets: Collaborative editing of spreadsheets – up to 50 at once
- Forms: Collecting student/parent contact information, and then creating contact groups in Gmail
- Forms: Check and submit assignments, or delivering quizzes and assessment – even automatic grading and score notification!
If you’ve never seen or experienced a collaboration session in a Google Doc, feel free to join me here or type in http://goo.gl/s5aXd to take a look! Also, if you have any questions about what I’ve presented today, or anything else about Google Docs, let me know here.
Great list. I’d like to add my number 1 benefit of Google Apps for Education and that’s using Google Sites to create class sites to share reading material, announcements, assignments, embed videos and quizes (using Google Forms).Another great benefit is Google Groups, where the teacher can start a discussion topic with students on a lesson or assignment.A final benefit is the Google Apps Marketplace with loads of great Apps to turbo-power Google Apps…..we created CourseDirector LMS in the Marketplace to turn Google Apps into a full featured LMS (using only Google functionality, so for example coursework is submitted to Google Docs, courses are created as Google Sites, quizes are created using Google Forms etc.) so I would definitely love to hear your feedback on it as well if you get time to check it out.