Day 1

Today my class started on their projects and I think it went well!  In a class of 25 grade 10 students, 17 were using gmail for email, 16 Chrome as a browser and 11 had experience with Google Apps.  It made the learning curve much smaller.  There was a good question about whether the students would have to set up the account, but I showed them that it was all done for them.  I demonstrated how to log into Drive, how to create a document, how to change the title and how to share with me.

As a class, we used Mindmeister app within Drive to create a mind map of what is an issue.  I used this to demonstrating sharing a document, which was a good thing as it allowed me to use a student with a more common first and last name and how to make sure it was the right person to share with (we looked at student numbers, low might be elementary, higher should be secondary).

Today was just an introduction and a general research day.  As we are looking at current issues, I also showed them Google News so that they could quickly skim news for Canada and/or Ontario.  Their task was to create a doc with their 'Top 5' issues.  I, with the head Librarian, will then use their lists to create a specific search strategy lesson for our next 20% class.

I have included my whiteboard (we were in the library) so you can see the instructions I gave them for how to use gapps.  I included the tip from Ken Shelton about naming files (last name assignment title), and they all did it that way.

The only problem I encountered was that not all of the Library computers can run Firefox, otherwise students have to use IE6.  For the students who could not get onto Firefox, they asked to use Word, but I asked them to make notes and upload them later in Docs.