The Interesting Ways series of resources continue to grow as the community add ideas from the classroom. Below is one of the most popular with over 70 ideas shared by teachers for using Google Forms in a range of different ways.

Make sure that you explore nearly 40 other crowdsourced resource like the one above – you can see the full series of resources on the Interesting Ways page

Over the last year I have begun two presentations that share practical tips in the use of Google Earth and the Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom. I have set the presentations up so that anyone with a practical tip can become a collaborator by sharing editing rights with them. In this way the presentation expands with the advice and tips from real users and from a much wider audience of educators.

All you need to do is send me your email and I will be able to add you as a collaborator to the presentation, so you can add just 1 or even 10 tips for the use of Google Docs in the classroom. (See details at the end of the presentation)

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The Interesting Ways resources have come a long way since 2008 – and this one is up to 34 ideas! I hope that you have enjoyed the short series of posts about using Google Docs and managed to take something that you can apply in the clasroom when you are working with collaborative online tools.

This is the second in a series of 3 posts I wrote for the Official Google Docs Blog – in this one I share some common challenges teachers face when students begin working together on collaborative projects.

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Communication is important, not the tool

The success of our own class projects was not influenced by how well the children could use Google Docs. After all, it is not really about the tool — it’s about the group’s ability to work together as a team. My class found this difficult throughout the year. I did not expect that just because we were using technology that the outcome would be any different. In fact even though each child was engaged with a role within the group and a task to complete, the technology exacerbated the lack of communication. The groups were plodding on with their own tasks and when it buffeted with someone else’s they would get upset. They may be working in the same online space, but that does not automatically indicate they are collaborating well.

With this in mind we raised the profile of the sense of communication within the groups and discussed with the children their teething problems and how we can best resolve them. With every resolution I drew it back to the idea of better communication. The class had a fuller understanding from these discussions of what they were doing when working together in Google Docs and some of the ways that their own communication was causing problems. To reinforce this in future sessions I would regularly stop the class to talk about an excellent example I had overheard from an individual or a group. One such example was when the children in one group lowered their laptop screens so that they could discuss the progress of their work so far. I raised it with the wider group ,we briefly discussed why it was such a good move, and through this we then saw the majority of the groups adopting this strategy.

How student personalities and familiarity with technology affect group work

You know what it is like: you try and balance a team and consider the characters that you put together in a group, but within moments they are falling out! I suppose using Google Docs does not make the task any easier. Out of the 5 groups in my class, 2 worked very well together, 1 was OK and the other 2 had lots of problems and struggled. On reflection, the groups that worked least well together were made up of perhaps 2 or 3 strong personalities that would naturally like to take a lead and this caused conflicts and problems as it has in other activities. When the children have their own laptops and a clear contribution to make within a document, that is appropriately structured, in my experience it can help a group work together.

I had children in my class that were very capable at using technology and were motivated and enthused at its use in our lessons but who often struggled with their literacy or maths, they were more confident when collaborating with Google Docs because of their own personal comfort with technology in the classroom. They pushed themselves forward to take a lead and be more involved when in a more traditional paper-based activity they may not have done. Similarly, the flip side of this is children who are very confident and capable in literacy who perhaps have less confidence when using technology. Even though composing groups within your class to collaborate is similar for any activity, it is important to consider the type of characters who grows in confidence when embedding technology in their learning.

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Next: Interesting Ways to Use Docs in the Classroom

In 2008 I was invited to write a series of blog posts for the Official Google Docs blog. I have decided to repost them here to highlight some of the challenges I faced at the time and in an effort to help you, not only with the use of Google Docs but also other online collaborative tools.

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Modelling expected behaviour and good practice first

As our first Google Docs project began to gather pace last school year, I realised that the children were finding it difficult to work together. With hindsight it is easier to recognise that the children were not only being introduced to a new piece of technology (the Docs tool) but also their traditional way of working was to be challenged by the new concept of working collaboratively in an online document.

It was clear that the children were unsure about the way they should be working together. They were each working on their own laptop and it was not the technical side of things that they struggled with, it was the fact they were expected to interact with others in their group as well as use a screen. I found it very useful to model the process. Just as I would if I were showing the children a style of writing in Literacy or a type of stretch in PE. I worked with a colleague on an example document and gave the class a running commentary as to what we were doing. As we worked we talked to each other and I underlined some of the key features of what made that short demo collaboration successful for us.

I think that every class of children will respond differently to the challenge of working together in an online doc, but it proved incredibly valuable to our classes to model what is expected of them. In September, I’ll have a new class and I will be keeping in mind this idea from the outset. Another idea would be to encourage the students to demonstrate the concept to the class – this is much harder to show but valuable nonetheless. I will be planning in time to model the technical and communications side of working together and also reflective time with the groups throughout the project to discuss and review the process of collaborating.

Introducing group collaboration: entire class, working in pairs, and groups of four

With the 9 and 10 year-olds in my classes, I found it valuable to take small steps towards an open collaborative project with 4 or 5 group members. As I introduced Google Docs to the class, we began to work together on documents that everyone could contribute to, revealing the ways that it worked and how it updates. In many respects this could be labelled as modelling the process that the children will in turn use later on. It proved valuable to be able to prove the concept to the children in a simple “step in, step out” controlled type contribution, nothing protracted. We added ideas to a large grid within a spreadsheet, with the children being told to choose any cell to write in – you could also invite them to fill in some information about themselves next to their name in a class list document. This single contribution to a whole class document was our first step.

It was followed by children working together in pairs on one document – a laptop each, sitting next to each other and sharing the document between them both. Finally the children worked in a larger group of 4 in a more lengthy collaboration as part of a Geography project. I believe it is important to progressively build up to bigger group collaboration and for this coming academic year I will be taking the same approach in developing the children’s collaboration experience over the first 6 weeks of term.

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Next: It’s About the Communication Not The Tool

It is often difficult to explain what Creative Commons licensing is to students and teachers – this short film does a pretty good job of presenting the facts.

I do think there is a need for more high quality resources to help teach licensing of digital content and especially resources to communicate what it all means to young student. What do you think?

It has probably been around for a while but I have just spotted the Google Image Search within a Google Document. But more significant is that the images are automatically filtered according to a commercial re-use license. Whatever you find there will be acceptable to use. 

You can see how the image search box within Google Docs works below and I have highlighted the small note explaining the license.

In the hope of widening my understanding of the perception of formative assessment, or assessment for learning as some like to call it, and also the broad nature of the challenges we face in the classroom, I have started this collaborative document.

People from all over the world have outlined what they believe are the biggest challenges to implementing and sustaining systems or habits of formative assessment. I will be looking for trends within the issues raised and hope to write a post soon about some of the common themes identified within it.

Please consider adding your own contribution to the document by editing it here and leave a comment of anything you are beginning to notice once you have read through the ideas so far.

Admittedly this is a great advert for Google Docs, but it also struck me that what I considered a simple tool can still create incredible things in the right hands. This little film really challenged my preconceptions about Docs – a sort of “I didn’t know it could do that!” moment.

Just discovered this nice little film which also explores the notion of tools, simple tools, however personal, making complex and beautiful things.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival: Pencil it In from Toronto Comic Arts Festival on Vimeo.

Last Friday I flew to Dublin, Ireland to attend the CESI 2011 Conference in Portlaoise. I was delighted to have been asked to open the conference with the keynote presentation.

I spoke broadly about the idea of crowdsourcing content with teachers and asked each teacher to use a Post-It note they had been given to write one idea, one simple bit of advice or tip that could be shared. It could be about technology, after all it was a technology conference, but could have been about anything.

The response was fantastic and the stage was awash with ideas. I cradled these all the way home to England and have now written them up as a Google Doc to share with the world.

We hope you enjoy the mosaic we made together in the last 10 minutes of my keynote. It always amazes me what we can create if we make one small contribution.

I have been fortunate enough to see many resources created by the thousands of willing educators using Twitter. However in my opinion there is a strong case for using hashtagging more systematically, so that we better organise and structure the resources, ideas and thoughts we all have.

A Twitter hashtag uses this symbol # folllowed by a unique word, abbreviation, acronym or phrase that defines the subject or theme of the tweet it is included in. It is a great way to filter and organise tweets so they are easily found by your network.

Simply put, the more we use tagging the easier it will be to find the most relevant tweets that share resources and advice etc.

One example of a resource created using hashtags is the sentence starter tweets I began under the tags #sentstartdecisions and #sentstarttree. I wanted to gather together ideas for sentence starters that can be used in the classroom. Each tag is specific to a topic or theme that gives other teachers a little bit of a focus for their contributions.

They have proven really successful, with nearly 100 contributions for just these two tags – a great resource for the classroom, to inspire planning and to engage young writers. However the tweets are not that useful as they are – indeed there is also the retweets that use the hashtag, so it is mildly littered with less than useful tweets. I have taken all of the sentence starters and created separate Google Docs presentations with them, a sentence starter per slide. I suspect that in this form it is more useful and accessible to teachers and students.

(Please feel free to edit the above presentations and add your ideas)

In fact by using the Twitter hashtag I have in effect added a step in the process. The Interesting Ways series is so successful because when users contribute they archive and extend a version of the presentation itself – there is no middle man, well there is me and I often add ideas on behalf of people, but there is no middle step, you add your idea and that’s it. Using a hashtag and then having to generate a presentation from that tag before it’s Twitter lifespan runs out is time consuming. (Tweets will eventually not appear in a hashtag search)

On the other hand, adding a sentence starter idea via Twitter is less clicks for a teacher using Twitter – they don’t have to go to Google Docs, add the slide etc. So it is easier to do it there and then and add the hashtag. In fact some school children were contributing with their teachers this week.

I believe it is important we encourage the alacritous members of our network in some form of creation. Whichever way you gather the ideas engage them in creation as much as conversation.