Google Educators

I really enjoy using Google docs. We used this for both of our unit plans (social studies and design). Last week when we had the snow day, my group got to really take advantage of this tool. I thought it was so very useful when my group linked our lesson plans (also in Google docs) to our Google doc unit plan. We invited our design teacher and she took a look at the same time. She chatted to us individually on how we could improve upon our lesson plans. She saw us add/delete and gave feedback quickly.

For another class, my group did a slide show and we got online to add our bits. Plus, what is great, you don’t need a USB drive, you just go right to the site and pull it up on the computer!

One of the things that I don’t really enjoy about Google docs is that when there are “too many” people on the same document; the cursor doesn’t want work where it is. Your cursor will be on line three and it will start doing what it is you want it to do on another line. For example I will have my cursor on line three and I will try to type in a word and it will start typing the word on line one.

This is something I highly recommend teachers use in their classrooms. And, if you have multiple computers available in your school, your students could work on the project simultaneously, instead of only having one person type at a time. (That happened to me in school. I had to wait my turn to add my part to a project.) With this it can be done whenever. Another thing I would use in my class is trying to link up to other classrooms in the world. I think that it would be great to see what other students are doing throughout the world. My third grade class is going to do a unit on Australia and I can use Google Educators to link up to a class Down Under!