Google drive is a great
tool for teachers and students. I love
the virtual flash drive capabilities. This eliminates the burden of carrying
one and the painful agony of losing one with all your work in it. I use drop box as my way to save things
personally, but I do like the versatility of Google drive. The ability to
convert between document styles could be helpful. As a math teacher, there are
many ways to use excel spreadsheets to teach, create and use data. With the
conversion ability, I now can use the excel tools for data purposes and then convert it to another format for
presentation purposes.
Google form is a great assessment
tool. With the help of their templates, one can easily create multiple choice,
text inserted response and essay response questions. This survey tool can easily be used to gather
information and data about your students, not only for assessment in courses
but also as a voice of what is going well in class and what is not.
All that Google offers can
open more virtual doors for collaborative instruction. Assignments can be easily uploaded with a
rubric posted. Students may easily access it from any type of device, even
mobiles like smart phones. Ideas can be bounced around while eliminating the
face to face shyness some have. Math classes are always though as computational
learning. By making up assignments that require writing and reading, not only
do these help them learn math, but they also help with cross curriculum into
the language arts. My goal in these assignments will be to extend the vocabulary
from conversational to an academic language.
As a teacher, this may also eliminate the use
for several bags in order to carry work the needs to be graded. We can save the
heavy lifting for the gym or the extra large pizzas!!! LONG LIVE PETER PIPER!!!!!!!!
One of the great things about Google Drive is the ability to use apps as add-ons, and there are some really great math apps available through Google. Two that I've seen other people use are Geogebra, which combines aspects of geometry, algebra and calculus, and a graphing calculator app, which can replace the use of expensive TI calculators.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you. There is nothing more frustrating than losing a flash drive, or even worse, losing a file among your multitude of flash drives, only to find that you originally saved it to your desktop. I like your thinking in terms of using Google Drive to have your Math students embed language arts into their curriculum. I, myself, am an avid Excel user and use it for everything, especially analyzing data. It appears that this Google application will be beneficial to you. Happy number crunching . . .
ReplyDeleteHi, Saul, like you, I also prefer to use Google Drive to save documents. One nice thing is that you only need to have one Gmail account to access all the Google programs. I have a Dropbox account too, but since I only use it for file saving, I found it hard to remember my Dropbox account.
ReplyDeleteYou touched on many great ideas of using Google Drive for education. Good job!