Investigative Teachers at Community West

A wonderful project at Community West in St Albans, where Dinna Tayao has invited teachers to join a weekly session of exploration and sharing.

I went out to visit Dinna and her team of investigating educators. They have been running a fantastic in-house exploration of all kinds of e-learning.

Each week one teacher explores a new strategy, software or other resource, evaluates its usefulness in class with students, and then reports back to the other teachers. 2 hours a week. They've had visiting expert speakers as well. Brilliant work from Dinna and the teachers at Community West. What a great job they are doing.

One teacher had researched the idea of using powerpoint to engage students in the colour, language and meaning of signs. What impressed me most was the way she had given such close attention to noticing how the students responded at each stage.

*Question of the Week*

I showed the teachers at Community West how google docs/ drive can work for collaborative writing. There was some enthusiasm around its potential, and also some reservation around the complication of requiring a login (too challenging for lower levels).

And a great question from one of the teachers: tell us who's been using this, and how?

[Oh no, did I really turn up without any case studies in hand? Yeh, I don't think they were too impressed actually, and fair enough.]

So who can tell us of some great examples or case studies of teaching and learning with google docs? Please add your thoughts in the comments below.

best regards, michael

Collaborate and create documents together - with google drive, desktop edition.

3 Questions:

• Are you using google docs? (aka google drive)
• Have you noticed that you can now access your google drive files and folders via your desktop?
• Have you noticed that you can share any kind of file via this cloud system now, not just google documents?

Google drive is now a lot like dropbox - a place to share files and folders with people in different locations. You get 5gb of storage space, and you can access and manage the filing system via your local file manager*. 

[*eg: Windows Explorer on windows, or Finder on mac.]

Most people are better at managing file systems via their own file manager rather than via a web app - making new folders, moving files from one location to another. Why upload via a web page, when you can copy/paste from one desktop folder to another.

Once you store files in the google drive space, you can share them with other people, either to view or to edit. It doesn't have to be a google doc. You can also publish documents on the web. For example, here's an intro to google drive (desktop edition), a PDF file stored in my own google drive area.

Updated, Dec13: [Download a copy here.]

4th question: is there enough info in this document to get started? What's missing?

Oh wait, I know what's missing. How could this be useful for education? 

Please respond to any of the questions in this post via the comments area below. Thanks so much,

Michael Chalk

PS: I have updated this document to mention that you can allow people different editing rights (thanks Jill for that feedback). 

What’s the Difference Between “Using Technology” and “Technology Integration”?

Are we just going through the motion or are we making a difference in the classroom with the use of technology? The table below makes a good comparison. Here is the link to teachbytes blog