Sunday, October 26, 2008

Google Docs are, well.... great!

I was wondering what the big deal was about Google docs so I decided to check it out on You Tube. I found a great video aimed at educators http://help.youtube.com/educators/p_docs.html and decided to try it out with my reading groups as a guided lesson for writing book reviews for our blog. http://4hughes.blogspot.com/ I checked out some laptops and then sat down with my group to write our first blog entries. I was able to do some of the typing, which really sped things up, but yet the students were able to add the most important details and thus feel ownership in the project. They were so excited to see their first post on the blog... and so was I.
One thing I would change is to have the students have another window open so that when it is not their turn to type (or if they are not helping someone type) they will not have too much down time. This could be a little tricky, as I don't want it to interfere with the discussions and collaboration, but I'm thinking something that is easy to start and stop would work just fine.
If you haven't already tried it, I would recommend giving google docs a try!

1 comment:

Jeff Lewis said...

Kathy,

I am going to add your blog to the sidebar of mine, so my students can check it out. So, did you do this within the context of a guided reading group? Did you have one laptop and passed it around to students as they had ideas, or did everyone have a laptop. I think this is a great way for students to post about what they are doing every day.