10 Ways to Use Google in Your Classroom
If all you’ve ever used Google for is email and web searches, there’s a whole world in which you’re missing out. That world is the Google Suite, consisting of a cloud computing compendium that puts all of your instructional tools in one easily accessed location.
So what can you do with Google in your classroom? As it turns out, Google offers a lot. Check out the list of ten ways use Google in the classroom:
- Collaborate with the teachers on your team, in your building and across the district by sharing folders in Google Drive.
- Differentiate instruction by creating folders with designated levels of access. That way your GT students can’t find and complete easier assignments, and your students in special populations can access the differentiated lessons they need.
- Communicate regularly. Use Google+ to create learning communities and Blogger to keep students and parents up to date on what’s going on in class. Visitors to your blogger site can interact with your blogs and podcasts.
- Offer model assignments. Students like to see examples. Use the Google shared drive to store holistically graded essays or an example of a well-written science experiment.
- Monitor assignments with Google Classroom. It’s a management tool that allows for customization and communication. Students turn in assignments electronically, and teachers provide digital feedback and grades to students and their parents.
- Curate content. Store the projects your students create and house your own specially developed lessons in Google Drive.
- Keep the date with Google Calendar. The calendar keeps you and your students current with reminders and alerts.
- Create Google forms. Developing forms in Google is quick and easy, so you can make seating charts, grading rubrics and more.
- Make it relevant. Take advantage of Google Earth and Google News for those teachable moments when you want to show what’s going on and where it is in the world.
- Incorporate the entire G Suite by getting Google Classroom. Google Classroom gives you at-a-glance views of which students are caught up on assignments and which still owe you work, and the suite brings all the Google services together for convenient access.
There are still a few things Google can’t do for you, like make coffee, but using Google in the classroom may affect your life outside the classroom. With Google, you won’t have to keep schlepping bags of work from school to home and back again. All your work is right there at your finger tips.
Google keeps instruction organized, accessible, and useful.