The eduFire Blog

Cool Cat Teacher just wrote a post about the use of Google Docs in her classroom, and how it allows her students to collaborate on spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. That got me thinking. How could it be used by tutors (or the students of tutors) on eduFire? Google Docs are a great resource for teachers and students alike to allow collaboration of documents – something you can’t do with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. Here’s what I came up with – let’s see if you can add some more.

Homework

Since both the teacher and the student can work within the same document (at the same time, even), a teacher could send homework via Google Docs, the student could fill it out, and then the teacher could correct it. When the next lesson rolls around, both the student and the teacher could pull up the document, and they can look over it together.

Presentations

One of the best ways for a student to learn, is to teach the subject they are learning themselves. A teacher could have a student make a presentation (though, if you’re using this in session, you should just use the present feature available in Adobe Connect), and then send it to you to look over. Once again, the teacher can make edits and notify the student. Plus, you can share these presentations with everyone in the world!

Keeping Track of Progress

If you’ve ever used a spreadsheet program before, you’ll know that it’s an excellent way to keep track of data. Using the Google Spreadsheet application, you can keep track of what the student has learned, when they learned it, etc. If you have a lot of students, this really helps to keep track of all that information. Also, you can share these documents with your students so they can see what they’ve learned, making it easier for them to review and make sense of everything.

Making PDF’s

Although there are a ton of other ways to do this, Google Docs is a great way to turn documents, spreadsheets, and presentations into PDFs, for even easier distribution. That way you know everyone can open the file you’re sending, and it will look the same for everyone as well, which is great since eduFire has such a broad community!

More information about Google Docs

There is also this great presentation (made in Google Docs, of course!) all about using Google Docs in the classroom. A lot of these techniques carry over to eduFire classes as well, so definitely take a look.

So, what ways do you use Google Docs in your eduFire classroom? How do you use it in your real life classroom? How do you use it in live tutoring? I believe the possibilities are endless, and only require a creative mind to come up with them! I look forward to seeing what you have to say about it!

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