After months of preparation and research, and weeks of procrastination and relaxation (thank you Spring Break!), I was finally able to introduce my class to both Google Apps for Education this week.
My initial hope was to get them up and running on Google Classroom, but after careful consideration, I decided to begin with Google Drive, Docs, Slides and gmail first. In retrospect, this was a good decisions, since to my surprise, most of the students were not familiar with using the web-based tools. The flip side of this was they were familiar with saving items to the school's network, so understanding Google Drive was simple and straightforward, they had a good handle on Microsoft Word, so Google Docs was a breeze and nearly all had existing email accounts, so 3 of 4 of the apps ended up taking little to know time to introduce and explain.
Google Slides was the last app to tackle, so I saved that for another day. Luckily, I was planning a creative writing lesson on that day, so Google slides gave me a perfect chance to put my own spin on Alan Levine's 5 card Flikr stories. I started by scanning Google Images (another go to Google App) and came up with the following 5 images. (Alan uses Flikr, but I wanted to demonstrate how to embed images and text into Google Slides.)
My initial hope was to get them up and running on Google Classroom, but after careful consideration, I decided to begin with Google Drive, Docs, Slides and gmail first. In retrospect, this was a good decisions, since to my surprise, most of the students were not familiar with using the web-based tools. The flip side of this was they were familiar with saving items to the school's network, so understanding Google Drive was simple and straightforward, they had a good handle on Microsoft Word, so Google Docs was a breeze and nearly all had existing email accounts, so 3 of 4 of the apps ended up taking little to know time to introduce and explain.
Google Slides was the last app to tackle, so I saved that for another day. Luckily, I was planning a creative writing lesson on that day, so Google slides gave me a perfect chance to put my own spin on Alan Levine's 5 card Flikr stories. I started by scanning Google Images (another go to Google App) and came up with the following 5 images. (Alan uses Flikr, but I wanted to demonstrate how to embed images and text into Google Slides.)
Many of my grade sevens had never used Power Point, so Google Slides was a bit of a steeper learning curve, but after a few examples and bringing students up to play with the applications' tools, they caught on.
The most encouraging part of the exercise, was seeing the students buy in and get excited about writing. Each worked feverishly on their stories and they are fired up about getting to choose their own images next time out.
Here is the link to the slide show the students and I put together in class. Next week the students will to create their own slides with their own images and share them with students in another class, who will then need to create their own digital stories based on the images provided!
The most encouraging part of the exercise, was seeing the students buy in and get excited about writing. Each worked feverishly on their stories and they are fired up about getting to choose their own images next time out.
Here is the link to the slide show the students and I put together in class. Next week the students will to create their own slides with their own images and share them with students in another class, who will then need to create their own digital stories based on the images provided!