I have never been a fan of Blackboard for
teaching online. I find it clunky and cumbersome. Worse, it seems to control
the flow of the course in ways that directly interfere with what I want to do (such as build community).
Specifically, there are two class activities that I have never been wild about
running in Blackboard – discussion and writing workshop. I have experimented
with using wikis, Edmodo, and blogs -- both stand-alone and with Blackboard -- but
none of these options have come as close to satisfying my needs as Google Docs.
Google Docs, if you do not know, is a free suite
of tools (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation) combined with a data storage system. Users can create, upload, and store files as well as share and
collaborate with others in real-time or asynchronously. Learn more by watching “Google Docs in Plain English.”
This summer I experimented with using Google Docs
instead of Blackboard for a small online grad class. While it was not perfect,
we (my students and I) all agreed that Google Docs was an improvement over
Blackboard – and especially for discussion and writing workshop. Here are some
things I learned from that experiment/experience:
The Good
One aspect that I didn’t think about early on
was how easy it was to share everything for the class with my students by
creating a folder for the class and then sharing it. No need to share new
documents as I created them – simply upload or move into the already shared
folder. Very handy!
Students also commented after the class that
they could easily copy the folder (or a specific folder, such as a collection
of course readings) to preserve for their own records. This is of greater value
for graduate and upper level undergraduate classes than say freshmen comp but
certainly handy.
For the type of collaborative class that I
wanted to run I loved how easily I could give my students the ability to
create, change, and generally collaborate not just on the documents but the
organization of the course itself. I believe this sense of ownership
contributed greatly to the overall satisfaction with the class.
Students commented that they liked how
everything was in one place – as opposed to Blackboard. I admit I did as well.
It was really easy to switch back-and-forth between assignments, discussion,
and course documents.
Students also liked the ability to discuss in
one document – rather than a discussion board thread – and to create thate
discussion collaboratively. When we were done with each discussion we had a document that could easily be saved and read again in the future.
In addition, students liked being able to
comment right on the work of their peers – in a comment thread that was very
conversation-like. They noted that this seemed to remove barriers between
writers and made writing workshop much more effective. Creating a sense of class community is important to me and students
agreed that the Google Docs helped foster this through the easy-to-use
collaboration and comment tools.
I must admit that I really like being able to
talk with a student right on a document in real-time. This feature was a prime
draw from the start to Google Docs and I was not disappointed. It also helped
create some of those lovely side conversations that you get in a traditional
class and can so easily miss in an online class.
The Bad
Of course that level of collaboration also
created problems. Sometimes documents and whole folders got moved by accident
and caused panic in the ranks until we figured out what happened and learned
how to correct such mistakes. Next time I will try to prevent this problem by
limiting the sharing (you can have editors,
viewers, commenters).
Obviously not every document or folder needs
to be highly collaborative so I will need to sort that out in the future. I
admit that while it caused problems to give everyone the highest level of
control (lost folders etc.), it was also really nice to share that
responsibility. Often times the problems were solved while I was away from my
computer.
The Ugly
Unlike most other course management systems,
Google Docs does not come with a built-in structure. I worked around that by
creating a Course Overview page with links to important documents (such as the
Powerpoint assignment sheets) as well as descriptions of the activities and
deadlines for each week. Even so, some students had some difficulty getting
started and understanding how Google Docs works and even where to find it. For
some students navigation was a constant problem.
And of course, you can’t really grade in
Google Docs because it is an unsecure environment, but I actually like being able
to clearly separate the workshop from the grading so this was not an issue for
me – maybe even a benefit.
Some tips:
·
My first mistake was not to simply
start with everyone creating a Gmail account. Sharing with other accounts was
possible but it caused problems and cut down on communication possibilities. My
advice, which I will follow next time, is to just start out with everyone
creating a Gmail account if they do not already have one. This could be a
drawback for some students.
·
Use folders to help you organize and
practice careful naming protocols for your files as well as enforce those for
your students. We quickly saw that inattention to either can cause problems and
that was with just nine people – I shudder to think about a class of 20+.
·
Finally, carefully think through the
levels of sharing – what roles do you want your students to have for specific documents
and folders? When should your students be editors, viewers, or commenters?
My students (all teachers) talked about how we
could use Google Docs in larger classes as well as younger students and most
were eager to try it out (in middle and high school as well as college). We
think for both discussion and writing workshop that it would be a good idea to
use groups and other protocols and tools to organize larger classes. We were OK
with an instructor and eight students interacting all the time in everything
but the consensus was that going much above 10 would make this unwieldy –
especially for discussion.
Look for future posts offering more details about
my experience with class discussion and writing workshop in Google Docs.
You can read more about teaching
with Google Docs with “Revisiting
Google Docs for Classroom Use” and “Google for Educators.”
No comments:
Post a Comment