WebedtecH

http://www.youtube.com/disco

An amazing application for YouTube to find music and artists you might not through other channels.

Docs Faceoff: Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs.

As the summer quickly slips by thoughts of lesson planning and lesson plans creep into the minds of teachers as the look towards the fall. Here are some thoughts and suggestions on how you can apply Google Docs to make your lesson plans easier to manage, maintain, and use during the coming school year.

Store them online

One of the obvious benefits from using Google Docs is the ability to store your lesson plans online. You can access them from home, school, or any computer with a browser and an internet connection. No longer are you limited to your own machine or your flash drive. Use them where and when you want to rather than when technology dictates you have to.

Write collaboratively

No teacher is an island to paraphrase the saying. You can leverage the collaboration functions in Google Docs to gather input from your colleagues on your lesson plans in a time and place convenient to them. More than just proof reading this is thought building on an educational scale.

Make them available online

Documents placed in Google Docs can be shared as read-only online resources through a simple URL. You can pass this along to substitutes, colleagues, even parents and students if the need should arise. If you update the document they are always working with the most current version, not that one that’s two months old and woefully out of date.

Revisions and revision histories

Lesson plans go through numerous revisions over time as they are kept relevant and fresh for our students.  Google Docs gives you revision histories so you can see what you have added or removed over time and see if everything old is new again or if that new section you added on a whim is really worth keeping after all.

Hyperlinking

Lesson plans no longer need to be the static printed document tucked away in a notebook that we reference as the year progresses.  Using linking from the plan you can connect to resources all over the Internet and make your plan grow beyon the basic to the engaging.  For example, if you’re  talking about Iran in a Social Studies program, why not connect to online news threads, Google Maps, and more to make the topic click for your students.

Creating an online lesson plan center

You can continue this idea even further and use Google Sites to create a class center for lesson plans, resources, images, and files all stored online and available at a moment’s notice.  Tie the pieces together in the platform and you’re all set.

Take the opportunty to use systems like Google Docs to make your lesson planning simpler and easier as well as bringing it to a new level of engagement and flexibility for the coming school year.

I’ve been an advocate and user of Google Apps for quite a while now and it’s nice to see  the system finally shed it’s awkward adolescent stage and take a step into the real grown-up world.  Good job!

Google Apps Leave Beta, Gunning for the Enterprise – ReadWriteEnterprise.

We are in the midst of a project requiring us to ask our parents and staff a series of questions and aggregate the results in a very short period of time…and for free. We’ve used SurveyMonkey and others of that ilk in the past but I thought this would be a great opportunity to use the Form function in Google Spreadsheets.

Here’s how it worked. We created the form in Google Apps using the New: Form option. It’s a basic questionnaire with only six questions. All but one question is a rating scale response, in this case a scale from one to four. The form was ready within 15 minutes and I created a TinyURL pointing to the form to be emailed to the survey respondents.

Here’s where we hit a snag. No matter how I set the access permissions on the survey it kept asking users to log into Google Apps to complete the questions. Now since this is NOT what we wanted we needed a workaround. Our solution was a hidden content page on the school web site with an embedded copy of the form (there’s a button that generates the Javascript for copy and paste ease) and then send the link to that page to the recipients. Bingo! Responses started to flow in.

I would be interested to see if anyone is willing to take a stab at creating a quiz or test for students using the same methodology (or has already and is willing to share).