So, I moved on to using Google docs, creating a new doc for each class I teach and opening it for editing by anyone with the URL, which I conveniently link to my LibGuide for the course (see the “Areas of research – educational reform” link on this Education 111 courseguide). In this case, I had students list areas of educational reform they were most interested in exploring; we then looked over the list together and thought about how we might locate resources for particular topics. The list also served as a way for students to see what their classmates were interested in exploring and perhaps get additional ideas for their own research. An unexpected benefit is that students were able to use the doc after our session — their professor asked them to post their research questions and thoughts to the class doc as they continued their research on their own.

One thing I’ve found helpful to do at the beginning of term is to create one document for each student with their name on it and then ask them to put any writing they do onto that. This saves a lot of hassle constantly creating and sharing Docs and makes them a lot easier to locate on Google Drive. It also has the added advantage that students and teachers can easily look back and see what feedback they got on previous writings and incorporate that into their new one.

do writing during a lesson and monitor their writing as they are doing it and provide ongoing comments to help guide them.

Another common classroom procedure that Google Docs can enhance is error correction. During the lesson, if you notice that students are making particular speaking or writing errors, you can collect them on a Google Doc and then share them with the group either at the end of the lesson or for homework. I would set the sharing settings so that students could only comment on the mistakes rather than edit them, and then they could work in pairs/groups to make suggestions in the margins as to what the correct answer is.