Title: Creating a Collaborative Course using Google Tools
Purpose: In today’s classroom it’s more important than ever to collaborate with our students and keep them apprised of valuable resources and upcoming schedules. The average instructor needs to devote most of his/her time towards developing pertinent curriculum, without the added burden of trying to get that content online in a useful way. Instead of spending hours learning the intricacies of HTML and web design, let Google provide an effective solution to your web publishing needs.
In this session we’ll focus on three free programs from Google: Blogger, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Google Calendar . Each of these applications is designed to make collaboration and publishing accessible to the average person. Within minutes of signing up for a Google Account, you can set up your own classroom blog from Blogger. This new blog can become an interactive portal to the content within your course. You can post assignments, pictures, links to resources, and your thoughts about whatever is going on in and out of class.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets is an online word processor and spreadsheet program. It can take your existing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets and put them online where they can be accessed by all the students in your courses. So, now all of you handouts can be available online. This program also gives your students the opportunity to collaborate on their assignments, as they can invite others to become co-authors on any document or spreadsheet. Real time data can change hands without the students even being in the same room.
Google Calendar is a scheduling program designed to help you stay organized and inform students of important dates in the course. This online calendar can be made public in such a way that students can view important dates and receive an email of updates or new information added to the program. You can share authorship of the calendar with teaching assistants or colleagues to help you keep everything up to date. By adding the calendar to your blog, you can maintain a central information hub for everything going on in your course.
Objectives:
*Explore free and easy to use collaborative tools online.
*Demonstrate how these tools can be integrated into curriculum and increase student collaboration, as well as improve instructor productivity.
Applications: Participants will see how to create and utilize the tools, and then learn how they can be incorporated into many classroom situations.
Support Information: This session is largely a “how to” presentation, with one year of anecdotal experience underlying the effectiveness of integrating these tools in the college classroom. Collaborative learning is a proven strategy for success, and this session focuses on some new tools that make collaboration easier and more effective with the aid of technology.
2nd-Day Hands On: How to Use Google Tools in your Class
Discover how easy it is to use Google’s free tools to create a blog, calendar and connect other tools that are mandatory for a highly collaborative instructional experience.
Handout:
Creating a Collaborative Classroom with Google Tools
Biography
Jared specializes in teaching strategies for classroom integration of technology such as GPS (Global Positioning Systems), web page design, and digital cameras. His background is in secondary education where Jared was a Language Arts teacher at the high school level. Jared received his Bachelors degree in English and his Masters degree in Instructional Design and Educational Technology from the University of Utah. Besides his work at UEN, Jared is also adjunct faculty for the College of Education at the University of Utah, where he teaches technology integration classes to undergraduate students.