Toot Your Horn! Share Google Apps for Education Ideas

[Molly Schroeder]

Hey Central Users Group! I'd like to start a thread asking everyone
who has joined to share their favorite, most innovative or most fun
use of Google Apps for Education in your school, classroom or
district. This group is for sharing ideas and collaborating together
and we'd love to hear about how Google Apps is transforming learning.

In my district we've had almost every 4th grade student create a
Google Site for their State Research Project. We used to have them
create a tri-fold brochure but then we asked ourselves when the last
time any of us asked for a paper brochure of a place we were going to
visit? The answer was "really long ago." Using Google Sites for this
project allows the students to share their learning and research
outside of the classroom walls and give them an authentic learning
experience.

We also used Google Docs>Forms for each student to create a quiz to
embed on their site and a customized "My Maps" map that the students
created that highlighted a few locations of interest in their state.

You can see a blog post that I wrote about this here:
http://followmolly.blogspot.com/2011/04/state-research-projects-going-google.html

You can Visit some of the 4th Grade students sites here:
https://sites.google.com/a/apps.edina.k12.mn.us/purdy-stordahl-class/2010-2011-class-projects

Now it is your turn...SHARE YOUR FAVORITE USE OF GOOGLE APPS!

[Anne]

Molly, loved your post about the Google Meet up in Chicago.  

[Regina S]

My school piloted it for the district (Middletown, NJ) this year and me and another teacher led the way. We did pd all year during dedicated days, PLC days, and various faculty meetings. We also worked one on one and created tutorials specific for our district. I am in the social studies department and due to the five of us in this having the entire population; we decided to wide scale integrate through our department and hope everyone jumped in. First marking period we used groups for the 8th grade civics mid term elections PBL where students researched candidates learned the process and formed groups based on shared interest in candidates they supported to share information, debate issues and learn from one another to ultimately write and respond to real world political bloggers (they learned really quickly how passionate Americans can be about politics and that most people who frequent political blogs are not polite because you are a student voicing your opinion). A few students asked the Language Arts teachers if they could form groups for their guided reading novels and we hooked in a few of those teachers. The 2nd mp all 3 grades created sites in their various PBLs, here is a 7th grade example. Third mp we blogged using blogger, 7th grade did westward expansion, 8th grade blogged as civil rights figures. This last marking period 8th grade social studies was forced to do the dread thesis paper with the Language Arts department (which I took the opportunity to introduce students to all of the specialized google search functions/apps google books,scholar, newstimeline, advanced search functions such as type, related search and reading level, I had them set up their iGoogle page with apps to bookmark, rss their subject related google alerts ), so I had to change my plans but I did manage to integrate it in my "Presidential Smackdown" assignment for 8th grade where the students used docs, groups and I introduced calendars. Finally, the 7th and 8th grades are having our 1st annual "Blog Awards" (their idea I just went with it) where they did everything, from designing the forms for initial rounds and the final rounds, coming up with the categories, designing a site for voting and creating a video for it, decorating the bulletin board and posting posters around the school and town; they also emailed our feeder elementary schools and the high school we feed into and invited them to vote (I was extremely proud of them). The teachers have been using docs from day 1 as our PLC sign up and documentation templates are in docs and the computer lab signup is in docs also. We had a busy year, and after the end of the year reflection with the students and staff we will hammer out our pd and rollout for next year. We are a 17 school district with 12 elementary, 3 middle and 2 high schools. Me and my partner decided to include incoming 5th grade classes from 2 of our sending elementary schools and the 7th and 8th grade students came with us and practically ran the entire thing! We hope to keep moving with apps (we are currently looking at LMS systems that sync with google) and I look forward to learning from this group! 

[Molly Schroeder]

Hey all...
So sorry I posted the Central group post in the technical forum. Keep
sharing ideas about GAFE though...love to hear them!