Math Monday -- Google Comes to Math Class

I am joining Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning for Math Monday.

I had been struggling with an authentic reason to introduce Google Presentation to my students. I needed a time when we would collaborate on a presentation rather than each student doing his/her own. And I needed a way for collaboration to happen without students revising each other's work.

When we were working on irregular volume in math, I found a way to use Google Preso! I created a slideshow with a page for each student and shared it to their Drives. I demonstrated how to use the drawing tools to make rectangular prisms. Their job was to first build two rectangular prisms using manipulatives, then combine them into one shape, and finally represent them and solve for volume on their slide. If they got finished early, they could add an additional slide and tell the three most important things about volume. For the sake of privacy, I have taken the students' names out.

Google Drive in the 5th Grade Classroom

It was fascinating to read Franki's post about Google Drive in her 3rd grade classroom, and reflect on how different this digital tool looks in my 5th grade classroom.

Before my students ever logged on, I shared a Doc with links to our guidance counselor's survey, and a survey I created to learn about my students' tech use at home (both in Forms). I did that so they would have something waiting there for them when they logged on. I also shared an editable Doc with a list of the characters we had met so far in our first read aloud, Room 214 by Helen Frost. I had them try to add details about each character simultaneously to show them the fun and madness that happens when too many people are working on the same thing at the same time. I had plenty of cleanup to do after we finished, but we continued to use this Doc as a digital anchor chart about the characters all through the rest of the book. In the very first sessions with Google Drive, my students also created Docs for the stories they would write about their Brown Bag item, and learned how to share with me.

The best part of continuing to roll out Google Drive has been working collaboratively with our fabulous Media Specialist, Marisa Saelzler.

When we moved on to comparing and contrasting characters, she taught my students how to use the Draw tools, and they made a Venn Diagram about two characters in The 14th Goldfish.

To introduce them to all of the tools in the universal tool bar, they made "About Me" posters (not sure if those are in Docs or Draw).

The next tool I'd like my students to use is Presentation. Now that I've figured out how they can get the photos and videos they take of their work in Genius Hour from the iPads to their Google Drive via the Google Drive app, I would like them to make a sort of digital portfolio or reflection log about the work they do in Genius Hour. Sure enough, Marisa will be previewing Presentation with my students during their time with her so that we can just jump right in with using the tool.

I've had some pretty spectacular failures with Google Drive. I thought it would be great if the students could share a piece of writing with a couple of friends and have digital peer conferences. Whoa! It was a chat-fest gone mad! A teacher-sanctioned IM party! And to top it off, even though we shared with "view only," they wound up being able to make changes in each others' stories. Not good. We haven't gone back there. Comments are now reserved for a conversation between me and the student. We keep peer conferences out in the open air.

Just yesterday, I followed the advice I gave myself long ago about hallway displays -- if it's something the students can do, let THEM do it (cutting out letters, etc). I like to have a slide show of images to go with the roots/bases words we're working on in word study since for some students they can be spelling words, and for others, they are new vocabulary. I hadn't had a chance to make one for our ped/pod words, so I shared the list of our words with a group of students who had finished their 3 Pigs Variant story (that's another post for another time) and they set to work gathering images.

One final note. Having student writing in Google Drive (and on Kidblog) is a fabulous thing. We can work on their writing in live time. They are much more receptive to revision and editing on a digital piece of writing. And I am flooded with what could be hours of reading and commenting on a daily basis. I am thankful for my somewhat OCD organization inside my Drive. My "Incoming" or "Shared With Me" is a hot mess of files from kids and colleagues that are in chronological order. Not helpful. I bring over the writing they share with me and house it in a folder on my Drive.

Here is My Drive. Nice and tidy.  :-)

Here is a peek inside the 2014-15 Kid Files folder in My Drive. Nice and tidy.  :-)

This has been a long post without many pictures, but thanks for staying with me to the end. Google Drive is an amazing tool with limitless potential. We have barely dipped our toes in the water. What have been some of your favorite discoveries or ways to use Drive in your classroom?

Google Drive in the 3rd Grade Classroom

Our district went Google this year and I've been wanting to take advantage of all the ways Google Drive allows for collaboration and creation.  So a few weeks ago we jumped in. I set up a doc and shared it with various groups of kids to work on.  Everyone signed in at once and it was a chaotic disaster.  I realized that I had forgotten one of the most important things I've learned as a 3rd grade teacher when it comes to new tools--that a shared experience is the best way for kids to see what is possible.  Instead of just sending kids off to explore a tool that they know nothing about, using the tools in shared experience can often give them a vision for what is possible.  So this week, we used Google Docs in two ways.

We did a Google Hangout with Colby Sharp's class on Friday.  We are trying to get together via Skye or GHO regularly about math and this week my students taught his students a math game. It was a game that requires a board and guessing. So, before the Hangout began, I shared the board with Colby in Google Drive. When we were in the Google Hangout, we shared the document on the screen so both classes could fill out the board and watch the game progress. (This is a game where one player/class guesses a number and the other player/class lets them know how many digits and numbers are correct. The kids enjoyed playing but were really excited about the way we both shared the same board and we could see Mr. Sharp's class adding a guess to the board.

Another thing we did this week was to preview our next read aloud.  We'll be starting The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane this week and I wanted to give kids time to preview the book before we begin. So I took photos of each piece of the book that one would preview (the epigraph, cover, illustrations before the title page, first page of the book). I included these in a Google Doc and gave kids the link for commenting.

These two things have given kids ideas for what is possible.  Doing a few things in a shared way always gets kids to play around and then imagine what else can be done with a tool.  This week in math, we'll use Google Forms for some surveying with a data lesson.  There are so many tools I am comfortable with and that I really don't even need to think about using in this shared way. Google is not one of those tools....yet. So I am trying to be better about embedding it naturally into what we do so students can see what is possible for their independent work.

My husband, Scott Sibberson, has lots on his blog about what Google offers. I need  to really dig into this more over the next few weeks.