This is the last installment of the “Google Tools Series” of posts. It’s been invigorating to me to hear about all the great things that are going on across the district with these tools. I would encourage everyone to keep sharing their great ideas on this topic by posting comments here or sending me a note so I can post them. This type of sharing can be a really powerful way to get new ideas.
Mindi Reshetar is a 7th grade reading teacher at Prairie Point. I had the pleasure of working with Mindi, and the whole 7th grade reading team, for the last three years as part of our effort to build an at risk reading program that was rich in digital literacy. Ying and I learned together with this group on how to design problem-based learning units. It was such a great experience and an honor to learn side by side with such a great group of teachers. Here are Mindi’s thoughts on using Google with her students.
How do you use Google Tools with students?
I don’t know if it is all that snazzy, but I have transitioned from using paper and pencil to graph our fluency cold and hot reads to using Google Docs. They each have their own graph/spreadsheet they update every couple of weeks. They enter the scores and then it graphs their progress. It works easier because it is clean to read- students don’t need to worry about graphing correctly or have the right size graph (if this makes any sense) I have some that are off the charts in their hot reads. I would like to figure out a way to create a document to graph their comprehension questions, too. I like this because they can easily share it out for conferences, etc.