Google for Educators

Google has an incredible variety of Rich Internet Application(s) (RIA) to assist not only faculty but also students. Below are three of the RIA’s offered by Google that I plan to incorporate into my classroom.

GoogleNews. An application that allows students to search not only the recent news but also an archive that goes back 200 years! Utilizing GoogleNews students can access first hand accounts of the news, rather than reading history in a text book- in other words, GoogleNews allows students to access the article written by a journalist about the Great Depression during the Great Depression. Buh-bye to boring text book accounts!

I will utilize GoogleNews within the Debate classroom to allow students to access pertinent information to build their cases, daily for the first ten minutes of class and for twenty minutes on Fridays. I will allow English students to access GoogleNews to formulate ideas and research for their exams, or to research the real context in which a literary text exists.

GoogleDocs. An application that allows students to create documents on any device with internet access, save it (it saves the document automatically), and access it on any device with internet access. No more saving documents to flash drives or CDs and uploading them to various points of access. Students are also able to collaborate in real time on the same document.

I will utilize GoogleDocs within the Debate classroom to create a space in which students can build their cases together- at home, in the classroom, in the lab etc. I will also require all student research to be pasted within GoogleDocs so that it is available to their group members (see GoogleGroups below) as well as to myself in order to discourage plagiarism. In the English classroom I will utilize GoogleDocs for the main manner in which students will complete work- I will also allow it to function as a means for peer editing and collaboration. This will allow me to understand who in the group is carrying the work load, and what contributions are being made by each group member.

GoogleGroups. An application that allows specific individuals (private group) or the public (public groups) to contribute and interact through discussion boards, pages, and shared files.
I will utilize GoogleGroups within both classrooms to set up specific groups for specific projects, in this way students will be able to openly discuss and collaborate with team members, store information accessed by each of them in an accessible and convenient place (pages), and share information with another. You can imagine what students would be able to create if they were able to access the same information as their group- at the same time- and collaborate.

The advantages of using Google RIA’s within the classroom are endless. Students can now collaborate in real time, there is never a worry of lost information (as it is all saved and accessed through GoogleDocs), and as an educator I can be fully aware of what is and is not taking place within my students’ work.