Thursday, August 30, 2012

GOOGLE!!!

I love google.  As I start a new school year, I spent the afternoon showing off google.  I realized that I no longer keep an paper planner.  In fact I haven't kept one for a few years now.  I use a google calendar for each of my classes.  When I first came to my current school, the google calendar was an easy way to follow our 7 day rotating schedule of rotating periods.  It's a crazy hectic schedule and with the classes color coded it was great to see everything. I would add events to the calendar and as I planned wrote the topics in the details. See an example:


The following year, I started sharing the calendar with students and parents by embedding it to my teacher website.  Now that the students have iPads they can add my calendar to their calendar apps and not miss the topics that are going to be covered for the day! Plus with appointments, teachers and students can easily schedule times with me, that I know will work for me.  The set up has taken time but it does work smoothly.  An added plus is I can easily review pacing of the course by flipping back through the years on the information.

This year I also plan on using google forms often in my classes, from surveys, and rubrics to attendance.  Google added a grid to the forms, this allows me to keep track of attendance with each student being a row.  Since it automatically timestamps for me I don't need to enter the date only the period.  I can also add any notes to the day that I want.  If  I need to go back and change someone's absence to be excused, I can edit it later.  This form has become a link on my home page of my iPad.

I am not the most organized person but maintaining the calendars and now the form has given me a chance to be somewhat organized during the day.  So thank you Google for the organization that you have begun to instill in me over the past 6 years.