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Don’t wait until it is too late! Using Google Docs to give immediate feedback.
By Linor David
In this video, I walk you through how I use Google Docs in a synchronous virtual classroom for in-class work. I find this technique useful for providing real time feedback on students’ understanding of concepts and prevents students from going too far down a wrong track. By setting up a clearly labelled document for each student, you have an easy way of checking up on students and directing your attention to the one’s who need it most.
Transcript – Don’t wait until it is too late! Using Google Docs to give immediate feedback (click to open)
Hi my name is Linor David and I’m a professor in the School Of Community and Health Studies at Centennial and today I’m going to take you through how I’ve been using Google Docs to do in class assignments. This has definitely been a bit of a process of trial and error but this is the way that I found that is the easiest for the students and allows me to really give a lot of feedback in real time.
So so what I do is I would start with creating my assignment in a template folder so that I have an original that I can use. Going forward so over here I’ve created my my assignment and I’ve called it In Class Assignment number 3 and so but I open it it’s ready to go it has the questions on it for my students to answer and they can easily work on it from the from this assignment and then what I would like to do is I like to create an assignment for each student if they’re doing it individually. And so what I would do was I would make a copy and so just going to file. And then I would go to make a copy. And then I would label the copy with the student’s name in the class and so I like to just keep a class list open and then I can quickly go through the process to make copies so a copy for. Alex. And then I make sure that I then save it in the folder for that class so this class will go here and then it will be saved in this assignment folder. When you can see I’ve already and then I keep it open so that everybody is able to edit it and I click on share it with the same people so that it’s it’s available to be edited by the student. And there I go and I’ve saved a copy for my next student and when I go to my class.
Who can see my in class assignment 3 I’ve started to save one for each student and then I’ll go down and I’ll make a copy for every student in the class and even though you might look at it and think to yourself oh that’s just like a task that takes too long my experience is that it probably takes like Max 5 minutes to do but it will save you a ton of time in class it’s a very organized me to do at school still get confused it’ll get lost they can what happens if I’ll give them the link to this folder in class assignment into a shareable folder. I copy the link I send them the link they open the folder and then they just look for their names they click on it and then they start working. And what I like about this is as they’re working I can click on the links as well and see how they’re doing and so I can easily tell students are really on the wrong path and I can check in with them and give them some further help and I can see when students are on the right path you can also see because of the last modified which students have not even opened it yet and started working on it and so maybe assume they haven’t actually figured out how to get on it and so you can troubleshoot the tech this way.
So I really recommend this as an easy way to do a math assignment if I do in class assignments with a group I will often do something similar either put everybody in the group’s name on the assignment so that when they get to it. Say it would say Arthur Alex and so on and then everyone would know okay this is my group and this is what I’m working on. Or if I am just planning to make the groups in zoom and send them into break out rooms then I would do something like that. Group one and everybody woods and you would send you a tell students that you know breakout room one is group 1 and breakout room 2 is group 2 and students have been pretty good at finding their their assignments that way too.
And that’s that’s what I wanted to share with you it’s been a really great way for me to kind of keep in touch with what the students are doing I’ve tried before kind of just making one document and asking students to make a copy for themselves it’s becomes very disorganized and so this seems like that the easiest and quickest way to to have everybody have the assignment and be working together on it. I hope I hope this helps in a small way it’s just one tip that that has been working for me thanks so much.
Additional Resources
Ditch That Textbook has a lot of good resources for using Google Slides and Google Docs in classrooms (I love using Google Slides also!). Here is a blog post about Google Docs which has some other ideas you can incorporate into your teaching.