A Teacher's Guide to Cloud Computing - Part6

Part 6 –Setting Up Documents and Lesson Plan

Let’s take a look at how a teacher sets up an online document in google docs.

Document Type 1 – all students edit the same document.

Set up a document. Log into the google account and set up the bones of a document. You can start with just a heading, question or outline of the project.

Share the document. Once the document is set up the teacher needs to share it to the students. The teacher clicks the share tab and types in the google accounts of each student. To make this process faster, the teacher can create a “group” that contains all the e-mail addresses of the students in her class. The one group address will add all the students at once. The teacher has the choice to add the students to the document as “readers” or collaborators. A collaborator can edit and change the document. In most cases the students need to be access to the document as a collaborator.

Let the students know. The document will appear in each student’s document list. Although it appears that each student has a copy of the document, there is actually one document. The teacher can also send an e-mail to the students to let them know a document has been shared with them.

Once the assignment is finished, the teacher can remove the student collaborators and just make them readers. That way the students can not continue to work on the assignment after it is due. There is no need for the students to print their documents. The teacher can simply access the document online. Being “Green” is an added bonus. When the teacher is grading the paper, she can simply do it online. Like the teachers of old, she can switch to red “ink” so her comments stand out. The teacher can annotate, correct and mark the document. Since the students are still shared as readers of the document, they can see that teacher’s comments and grade. There is no need to print out assignments or hand them back.

Document Type 2 – each student produces their own paper.

In this example, the teacher has a document for each student. An efficient way to do this is to require the student to create the assignment document and share it with their teacher. The teacher would give an assignment like this:

Create a document in your google documents account called “Your name - how I spend my summer vacation". The document must be shared with the teacher as soon as it is created. Go to share document and add smith@gufsd.org as a collaborator immediately.

As the students start the assignment, their documents appear in the teacher’s document list. She can tell right away who has done their homework and who hasn’t. There will be a document for each student in the class. Even though the document shows who you are sharing it with, having the student name in the title makes it even easier. Here is how a teacher’s document list will look with student docs in the mix.

The documents appear in the teacher’s list when the students create and share the document. The teacher can sort the files into a “Summer Vacation” folder to keep that assignment together. As the student work on their themes, the teacher can see how they are progressing and offer comments and help to struggling students. She is also able to see a revision history for each document. She can see how often the student accessed the file and what was added each time. For students who are struggling, this can be a valuable teaching tool.

LESSON PLANS:

Lesson plans can be adopted for use with online Docs. Here is a standard lesson plan for Middle school science:

LESSON 1 - Middle School Science

This lesson uses Google Spreadsheet to have the students pull together shared data gathering.

Hazardous Chemicals at Home

Brief Overview:

Students find potentially hazardous common household chemicals and classify them into categories.

Curriculum: Science
Standards: 6-8

Goals: Students will learn that common substances in the home are chemical compounds. Students will learn that many household substances are dangerous (poison or toxic). Students will group household chemicals into categories according to whether they are toxic, corrosive or poisons.

Lesson: Following class discussion about chemical elements and compounds and chemical families, there will be a discussion about types of hazardous chemicals and categories of such.

Students will be asked to make a chart with categories of "toxic', "corrosive", and "flammable". We will discuss the meanings of these words and give a few examples in class.

Students will be asked to go home and search the cleaning closet, basement, garage, etc. and see what kinds of "hazardous chemicals" are at their homes. Students will be encouraged to use the computer to make a chart or graph showing their results.

The teacher sets up a Google Spreadsheet Document detailing the lesson. She shares the document with the class . Each student adds a row to the spreadsheet for each chemical they find at home. Student who do not have internet access at home, will bring a written copy and enter their findings into the spreadsheet at school. Here is the spreadsheet:

The students are collaborating on the project immediately. They can see what other student have entered. Once the table is completed, it can be published as the students' "Findings".

Conclusion –

School can change the way students do their computer work by joining the cloud computing boom. In researching this paper, it seemed like there was new information on this topic coming online daily. It is an exciting time to be in education and I’m hopeful that this new trend towards cloud computing will see some very positive benefits for school districts.

Notes about the production of the paper

I started researching this topic in the fall of 2007 after learning about Google applications in a class at Stony Brook in July of 2007. Initially I did not realize that the term cloud computing applied to storing student documents online, which is were my focus was.

I presented my initial research and findings at “the Campus of Excellence”, in June of 2008. This conference was held in the Canary Islands and gave an opportunity for graduate students to present their work to experts in the field.

The feedback I received was mixed. Richard J. Roberts, 1993 Nobel prize winner for Physiology, talked about the importance for scientific information to be posted on the web for all to share. I talked to him about the student’s posting their work and he was concerned that the student papers would “dilute” the more important information posted on the Internet.

A fellow graduate student from Canada, Annemarie Lesage, felt that students were opening themselves up for ridicule if they put documents online. She felt peer review was a bad idea.

But I pressed on. My school district was very supportive of me trying out cloud computing in our district. I was give a staff development day in September of 2008 to show the staff how it all worked. I created the accounts for teachers and staff and did the training.

I wish I could say that it has been an unqualified success. The problem is the staff doesn’t want to change. They like using Microsoft Office products and so they continue on they way they have.

I decided to present my finding at another conference. The A.S.S.E.T. Conference (Association of Suffolk County Supervisors for Education Technology) on Monday, March 16th, 2009 gave me another place to present my ideas. My talk was attended by many administrators as well as teachers. That group was concerned with saving money. Economics was not a huge motivator for me when Istarted this project, but it has become a big priority. Cloud computing can definitely save a district money.

So this project just kept going and going as more information on Cloud computing seemed to be coming out every day. Today as I was finalizing this paper for e-mail to my Dean, another white paper arrived in my mailbox from e-school news “Cloud Computing: The Economic Imperative”. I had to force myself not to read it and to submit this project as is. I think I have been living in the clouds for too long!

Bibliography

Hoover, J. Nicholas. "A Stake in the Clouds." Informationweek 3 Nov. 2008: 22-26.

D'Orio, Wayne. "Working Together". EdTech November/December 2008: 33-36

Johna Till Johnson, “Are Young Workers really all that different?”, Network World Magazine, October 27, 2008, 28

Horrigan, John B., Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Data Memo, Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services”, September 2008

Oishi, Lindsay, “Working Together”, techLearning.com, 11/22/2008,

Google Apps Education Deployment Pack, 2008, Google.com

National Geographic Society, “Inventors and Discoverers” National Geographic Society, 1988