Stephan Rinke is a subject area manager in the languages department of Volkshochschule Essen, an adult education college in Essen, Germany. He was also an early contributor to our community channel on YouTube.
"We often use Google Docs in our language courses to give students the opportunity to improve their writing skills cooperatively. Frequently we create Google Documents as a basis for group work. Typical activities include:
making a boring text more interesting by adding more detailed descriptions as well as adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
changing the tense of a text to practise grammar (e.g. changing a text from present tense into future tense)
Students find these tasks motivating and also create class notes and longer documents collaboratively. And with Google Docs being web-based, students often use the opportunity to complete their group tasks from home. Google Docs plays an important role in our efforts to promote cooperative learning."
AntónioOliveira teaches Information Systems at IPCA (InstitutoPolitécnico do Cávado e do Ave) in Barcelos, Portugal.
"My name is Pedro Oliveira and I'm giving a class of information systems on IPCA (Barcelos, Portugal). In the last semester, all my students delivered a document (done in groups of two students) with their final work. They liked very much the possibility of using Docs to work in the same document, without having the problem of managing the versions, worries about the security and backup plus. One of the main features that I found was the ability of following their work (each group gave me access to the document), since the first day, inserting comments along the documents and giving clues to the students. Moreover in the end all of their work was published (with a click) and presented to the student community. All I want to say is thanks for the excellent tools that you have and keep up the excellent work."
2) We turned this into a Form, and sent it out to our list of families. As I mentioned, we already had their email addresses, so we were able to include the form directly in their email! They could also click a link to view the entire spreadsheet - we wanted everyone to be able to see what everyone else was doing, although Google Spreadsheets does allow you to restrict this.
3) Amazingly, we had almost all of our responses within 3 days! I was expecting some phone calls and emails from people who were a little confused or didn’t understand how the form worked, or how to view the spreadsheet. But I had zero questions. And I know that many of the families are not exactly comfortable in front of the computer if you know what I mean. What I DID get were comments from four of the families saying “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that with Google! Can you show me how to do this? So I sent them to Google Docs and shared this video - Quick and Easy Forms - with them and that was all they needed to get going.
A few of the things that made this a very workable solution:
We were able to create and share the form within minutes.
Spreadsheet updates in real time allowed my friend and I - in different locations - to see the same data as it came in, in case we needed to adjust anything or track how things were going.
The ability to include the form in an email made it super easy for people to fill it out right away.
The ability to let everyone view the spreadsheet over the web in their browser allowed them to see what other families were doing, or get their phone number in case they needed to discuss how they were going to team up on a meal, for example.
Our trip is later this month, and now we’ve got the meal plans all figured out two weeks in advance. With that out of the way I’m looking forward to a great camping trip and meeting some fun new families. Oh yeah, and eating some really good meals too!
Posted by: Don Campbell, President of Expand2Web and happy camper
During the school year, my hiking group and I meet every six weeks or so. We hike all over Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, as well as the Channel Islands, exploring new trails and renewing our friendships in beautiful surroundings. The last time we met, we climbed rocks, forded streams, and sat at the side of a riverbed to eat lunches from our backpacks. Usually this is when we decide on our next date to get together, but this time we hiked back without deciding anything.
With summer approaching, all six of us all had plans to be away on vacations at different times. Due to so many varied schedules, it looked like we might have to suspend our meet ups for the summer. This, until my friend Mary, who knew I'd been developing Google forms for classroom applications, suggested that I send out a form to collect vacation schedules from our hiking partners. Brilliant!
(A photo from a recent hike. This is what it's all about in the end :)
Once everyone sent me their away-dates through the form, I plugged them into Google Calendar. We are all going to be busy this summer, but looking at everyone's schedules, I realized that there were still a few hiking days available. Compared to traditional scheduling, rigorous hikes are a breeze. Using Docs forms for scheduling, however, makes even easy hikes seem difficult by comparison :)
Here's the form I used to collect the info (so simple, no?)
Stephan Rinke is a subject area manager in the languages department of Volkshochschule Essen, an adult education college in Essen, Germany. He was also an early contributor to our community channel on YouTube.
