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7 Cool Ways To Use Google Docs in your Teaching

There are many ways that Google Apps can be used to streamline your teaching.  For this post, I wanted to narrow my list to just Google Docs because the list would have to be extremely long to cover the possibilities for all Google Apps in any real depth. So here we go:

Lesson Plan Collaboration: Teachers can use Google Docs to share lesson plan ideas. This is a good idea because of the collaborative capabilities of Google Docs.

Teacher Document Collaboration: Another good way for teachers to take advantage of the features of Google Docs is for teachers to collaborate or share student documentation and forms. Documents can be saved as read-only so teachers need to make a copy  thus saving the original copy.

Class notes: I allow students to take collective notes. They divide up the topics and take notes on their chosen topic. Students usually express concern initially about errors by their peers. I address this by referring to their notes during class discussion in order to point out any errors for correction.

Meeting minutes: The faculty senate at my high school uses Google Docs so they can share meeting minutes quickly using a Google contact group they create at the beginning of the year.

Peer editing: When I started in teaching, peer editing consisted of students passing their paper to somebody else in the group so they can make comments and so on until all parties have read and offered feedback on each other’s papers. Now it can be done with the share option. Be sure to allow for comments in the share settings. You can also create a rubric to help guide the peer editing process.

Student journals: Common Core writing standards call for students to engage in both short and long term writing projects. Creating individual folders to organize their writing assignments is also good for organization and being able to review for evidence of growth of skills. Check out my post on Maintaining Student Working Portfolios with Google Drive.

Letter Translation: Letters home can now be translated for non English speaking families. This feature can be found under the Tools tab. The list of languages is pretty exhaustive so you would be hard pressed to be looking for a language that isn’t available.

How do you use Google Docs in your teaching? Please share your ideas in the comments below and follow me on Twitter @JoshuaElliott3 for more tips and ideas.