Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way.
The sharing features of Google Docs enable you and your students to decide exactly who can access and edit documents. You'll find that Google Docs helps promote group work and peer editing skills, and that it helps to fulfill the stated goal of The National Council of Teachers of English, which espouses writing as a process and encourages multiple revisions and peer editing.
On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom.
"Day one of introducing Google Docs to a class is always an exciting one, I have been fortunate to be able to see three cohorts experience the fun ways to use it. Today we made a start with our Year 5s and had a great afternoon."
Even though Google now offers ten times more services for Google Apps for Education than they did at the beginning of the year, they still don't have a gradebook service. But the next best thing is a new offering from the free online gradebook system LearnBoost (previously reviewed here and here). LearnBoost can now be integrated into your Google Apps for Education account. LearnBoost can be found here in the Google Apps Marketplace.
What follows is a proposal I submitted to my headteacher regarding a trial of the use of Google Docs (as part of the Education Apps) to deliver online reporting to the parents in my class.