Teacher task software is abundant for instructors to perform all types of teaching and learning responsibilities. After completing the Google Docs projects, reflect your working experiences when collaborate with your group members by using Google Docs. You may want to focus on how you use these technologies into your own classroom and how Google Docs promote active learning and collaboration among students? Make sure to use Chapter 7 as your reference. Link your projects at the end of your reflection and make the links open in a new window.
We created the four projects for our flipped course this week, including an online survey set up with Google Form, a course plan and two collaborated projects finished in Google Docs and Google Slides.
According to the textbook, there are mainly two types of software for teachers' use, productivity software and classroom management software. Google Doc and Google Slides belong to the first category because they are in the form of word processing and presentation programs. Since we need to work on our own topics for these two projects, our group decide not to work at the same time but first finish our draft in Google Doc and Google Slides. Then we share the link with each other under the "everyone with the link can edit" mode for mutual commenting and editing. I enjoyed the procedure because, during the process, my classmates were able to point out some drawbacks that I failed to notice. Sometimes I had the experience that I can figure out some mistakes in my documents when I view them again after 1 or 2 days. Collaboration makes the products perfect because the product would be checked with people possessing a different perspective. For example, in my slides, I was concentrated on changing the color of half of my paragraphs to white but failed to notice that one of the words is invisible with a light blue background color. Adrienne helped me to fix that. And I helped Tammy and Adrienne to add their credit pages. That's why I enjoyed the collaboration in Google Doc and Google Slides.
Integrating Google Doc and Google Slides into teaching and learning would be a great choice for teachers. The first thing came up to my mind is the convenience for students to store nothing. The textbook mentioned this advantage on Page 164 but it only emphasized teachers' benefits. Well, considering the fact that students under K-12 would not usually own a jump drive or other storage devices, Google Doc and Google Slides are good substitutes. The second point to notice is teacher's well-panned instructions. During my internship, I was required to help a first-grade teacher design an activity to teach the kids telling hours and half-hours. At that time, I used Google Slides. I made the decision by 1) Students have access to Chromebooks 2) Students have their own Google Accounts 3) Google Slides allow students to work on each single slide without bothering other peers' works. So, I assign students to one of the slide in Google Slides with the pre-designed background. You can see the clock is set as the background image because I didn't want when kids tried to draw the "short hand" and "long hand", they would accidentally move the clock now and then, which would be annoying to them. And finally, it turns out the plan works well. So based on my experience and chapter seven text, I can see we have so many choices for teacher tasks but without detailed plans in advance, it will only be a fancy time-wasting class.
The projects for this week are linked as following: