There's report from the teachers to use the Google Documents and Spreadsheet in the education (please refer to http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs_spreadsheets.html). For sure the features of Google Documents and Spreadsheet, as web-based and collaboration, make it very suitable for the education activities.
On the other hand, I found that there's scarce detail description on how use Google document and Spreadsheet for a teacher. I have put several weeks' effort (of course in part time) and developed an Assignment Web-Review Process to help the teachers adopt the Google Document and Spreadsheet early.
Please note that this process assumes the assignments are put to the individual student; that means, the students must complete the assignment independently. However, this process can be easily adapted to a group-based assignment.
2. Introduction
In a typical case, a teacher who holds a course will have a series of assignments (e.g. writing an essay) for the students. The work on the assignments requires the involvements of both teachers and students. Simply, there are three phases:
- Phase 1: The teacher prepare the requirements of the assignment and announces it to the students
- Phase 2: The students develop the assignments and the teacher review the result
- Phase 3: The teacher summarize the result
It will be clearer when we use Process Map to describe these activities:
| Phase | Primary task | Access setting | Description |
| Phase 1 | |||
| Assignment Preparation | - teacher - all classmates | Teacher writes the requirements of the assignments in a documents | |
| Assignment Announcement | - teacher - all classmates | Teacher announces the assignment to the class; to easy the process, a class bulletin can be used | |
| Phase 2 | |||
| Assignment development | - teacher - individual classmate | The student is doing the assignments, e.g. writing a essay, in a Google document; The teacher can see the document to check the status and give support if needed | |
| Assignment review | - teacher - individual classmate | The teacher review the assignment when it is finished; also, the teacher will give comments and a score | |
| Phase 3 | |||
| Assignment summary | - teacher only | The teacher summarize the scores for all the assignments and all the classmates in one spreadsheet; at the end of the class, an evaluation can be made for all classmates based this. |
With Google Document and Spreadsheet, this process can totally be done on the Web. The detail procedures are described below, with an example and tools developed for the process. The tools are provided as templates.
3. Description
3.1 Phase 1: Assignment Preparation and Announcement
In this phase, the teacher prepares the requirements for the assignments. This requirements can be made with a Google document. An example of the requirement is as following:
===============================================================Course: New Idea Generation
Teacher: xxxx
Complete Date: Friday, this week
Assignment:
Write an essay to describe the most impressive thing today. Don't forget the techniques we have learned in class as "featured thinking" or "benchmark".
The title is: The most impressive thing today
Process:
1. Write the essay with Google document
2. share the document with me as a collaborator so that I can add the comment to it
3. open the class assignment tracking spreadsheet and past the link of your essay to the cell that is corresponding to your name
the tracking spreadsheet is here: class assignment tracking spreadsheet
Note: to get the link of your essay, go to your Google doc home, put the mouse on the top of the name of the essay, right-click the mouse and then select "Copy Shortcut"That OK, I will add the comment in your essay
============================================================================================
This document should be published so that every students in the class can have access to it; The link to the above example is: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dd2kr2g4_10cxcn4b
Next, the teacher need to have all the students got the link of the requirements. This can be done by send mail to all students. However, there's better way to communicate with the students, a tool we called the Class Bulletin, as illustrated in the next snapshot:
Link to the template of Bulletin: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p
To the student, after the assignment is announced in the class, the student then can go to the Class Bulletin to find the requirements of the assignment and start to work.
Besides the information of the assignment, the Bulletin is also useful to share other information as:
- email addresses of all classmates and
- reference books required by the class
3.2 Phase 2: Assignment Development and Review
In this Phase, the students will develop the assignment with the support of the teacher; when the assignment is finished by the students, the teacher will review the work, give the evaluation, and then score it.To enable the interaction between teachers and students, a tool, called Assignment Tracker, is introduced. It is made with Google spreadsheet, as illustrated in the next picture:
Link to the template of Tracker: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=o15303133726327222255.2015689958310057446
This Assignment tracker has a list all student's name, links to their works, and instructions for the student; This tracker shall be made by the teacher and can be accessed by all the students in class; The template of Assignment Tracker is available here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=o15303133726327222255.2015689958310057446
The first thing for the student in this phase is to create a Google document to write the essay on it first, then he/she past the link of the document to the tracker (in the column of "Assignment Link"), and then the student can work on the document. To let the teacher know the status, the student can also add a note in the tracker (in the column of "Status"), as "Work in Progress" or "Ready for Review", even as 'Help me!", etc.
For the teacher, he/she can monitor the progress of all the assignments in the column of status; Furthermore, the teacher can click into the link to go through the assignment document to see if the support is needed.
When the students finish the work, they can change the status in the tracker to "Ready for Review". The teacher, on the other side, then can take a through review of the work and make comments on the documents, and give a score of the work, The last look of the document looks like this:
Please note that the words in blue color are added by the teacher.
3.3 Phase 3: Assignment Summary
When all the assignments are reviewed and scored, the teacher then can make a summary for the results of all the assignments.
Link to the template of the summary: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=o15303133726327222255.6707018715523248924
The Assignment Review Summary is accessed by the teacher only. It contains the results of all the assignments and can be used to have a final evaluation for each student, to check the effectiveness of each assignments, and to observe the trend of the students' achievements.
The template of Assignment Review Summary is available here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=o15303133726327222255.6707018715523248924
4 Summary of this Article
At last, we use a picture to illustrated the review process that is implemented on Google documents and Spreadsheet.
And the list of the tools and the templates made with Google spreadsheet.
Table-2 List of tools
| Tools | Templates |
| Class bulletin | link to Class bullentin |
| Assignment tracker | link to Assignment tracker |
| Assignment review summary | link to Assignment review summary |
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