Calendars

In the Ontario curriculum, teachers are to assess students' learning skills (responsibility, organization, initiative, etc.).  Google Apps will definitely be helpful in this regard!  I decided as one of my assessment tools, I will use Calendars as a means of assessing the student's organization.  I asked them to plan out the next 2 months for the project, because they need to work outside of our 20% time in order to complete their action.

So by the end of the first week, the students were asked to share their calendars with me.  This is what my calendar now looks like for the month of May.  Some of my students are really busy on their actions! Another learning skill done as I can see some great initiative here!

I told the class I will be using their calendars on Fridays (our 20% day) to "check in" with them and see if what they have on their calendar is what they are working on.  The next part of this is integrating what is on their calendars with a self-assessment Google Form.  More on that in the next week, once they have completed it.

Week 2- Forms and Search

For our second week, I enlisted the help of the Head Teacher-Librarian for a search strategy lesson.  The students were asked to fill out a form (new page here with all the forms being used) which would then direct the lesson.  This did not work out that well; only 7 of 25 students filled in the form before class :/   We used what information we had to help the students narrow down their search.

First we used Wiki Mind Map (always use the en.wiki-more information appears) to demonstrate subtopics they could explore.  I showed them our Google Search Posters, especially the one with qualifiers ("", OR, -, etc).

Then we touched upon Works Cited.  The students had already been shown the research tool in Documents, but we had noticed that it did not quite match up with the current MLA handbook.  For example, images are 'cited' with just a web link, not the MLA standard.  The students were reminded to double check the entries against the MLA sheet the Library posted on their Moodle site.

I am happy to say that students are being proactive and sharing their research notes with me, without being asked!  And using the correct document entitling (last name, P1 title).  One student last week had shared her topics but had the wrong title for the document.  I reminded her in class, but she had caught the mistake herself and fixed it! Initiative!

The rest of class today was using the information in the forms for a teacher-student conference, the students completing the form, researching and creating their calendars (due Tuesday).  I returned to my office with multiple invitations for sharing calendars with me.

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.