Homework due 11/11 - My class assignment

MY CLASS ASSIGNMENT:


This assignment went quite well with a glitch or two that were beyond my control. Our entire school was just set up with each student and each teacher having their own Google account (through woodsidehighschool.org, not google.com) and it is controlled by the school. It is a student web portal and all iGoogle pages/dashboards are predesigned with links to their E-mail, Google Docs, News, Dictionary, NotePad and Calendar.

I first talked about Google Docs and its many advantages and uses. I demonstrated what a regular Google page looks like and where to find Google Docs, etc. Then I showed the students what our Woodside Google page looks like and where some shortcuts are located. Next I showed them the different kind of documents they can create, many of the menu items and icons, how to rename & share their files. I then showed them one of the documents I created with my partner in this class so they could see what the Revision History looks like. I also talked about the proper way to save an image or the url to an image and how to insert it into their presentations or other documents.

We also talked about searching the web for news articles. I showed them the school’s library site and showed them where to find current news articles. Then I showed them how to get to news through Yahoo.com, Google.com, abcnews.com, foxnews.com, cbsnews.com, msnbcnews.com, etc.

I told all students what their new Google login was and their password. This is where the first glitch occurred because some students didn’t have Google accounts, even though they were supposed to. It took over 24 hours to get the administration to fix this problem so those students were on temporary hold.

I had students form groups of 2 for this project and had them decide who the owner would be. For the students who couldn’t get into their Google account, obviously they weren’t the owner. The owners set up the first slide with the required information and the editor made sure they received that file.
Next we went over the requirements of the assignment:
Title slide with title of article and names of partners
Three slides per student summarizing the article
One image required per student
Reference page citing the article and the image.

The other glitch was that a few students had formatting problems in their presentation. For two students the text would only fill about 1/8 of the screen before wrapping around to form a very long narrow box of text that went completely off of their slide. One I was able to easily fix easily by creating a new slide and copying the text into it. Another one took much more effort and I ended up retyping the text on a new slide. Another student had her font size change every time she clicked out of that slide. After a few attempts, we decided to just let it go.
When adding backgrounds, some students wanted to change the background to only one slide but if they were using the Themes, this was not possible. If they made a mistake changing the background, “Undo” didn’t work.
All in all, after we got over the main humps, it went pretty well. Because I know MSOffice so well and all that it can do, the restrictions of Google Docs was quite frustrating to me and also to my students who know it well and use all of its many features but I can certainly see a use for Google Docs, especially for students.