WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
At the start of this academic year I’ve been giving the majority of the students I teach accounts (@mrbelshaw.co.uk) using Google Apps for Education. This is free of charge and, so far, seems fantastic. As a result, I’ve been thinking about what I can now do that I couldn’t do or would be difficult to do before. This, as I’ve posted about recently is the School 2.0 approach I want to be helping work towards.
Wikis are all well and good, but they’re usually public. I think Google Docs can be used as a wiki-like solution for smaller groups and are a more private solution. Last academic year, in a post entitled Coursework 2.0, I outlined how I used Google Docs with my GCSE History students for their coursework. There were teething problems but it opened up many possibilities. Because of the nature of coursework, however, we weren’t using Google Docs for inter-student collaboration.
This academic year I want to use Google Docs that are part of students’ @mrbelshaw.co.uk accounts for peer and self-assessment. There are many names for what I describe and some people may know it as a form of Assessment for Learning. Here’s what I plan to do:
- Set students learning objective(s) and success criteria.
- Student writes response to question/completes project/produces agreed content.
- Student invites teacher to view document.
- Teacher assigns students ‘critical partners’. These could be either those at a similar level or different, depending on the purpose of the activity. (I’ll mostly be going for the former)
- Critical partner uses learning objective(s) and success criteria to evaluate and provide feedback on original author’s work.
- Original author modifies work in light of comments by critical partner.
- Work is submitted by original author to teacher by a given deadline.
- Work is assessed according to learning objective(s) and success criteria by teacher and returned to original student author.
The beauty of this is its inherent flexibility. The first time I do this, I’m likely to use people within the same class - or at least within the same year. But there’s no reason why ‘critical partners’ could be in different classes, years, schools, or even continents!
Teachers can subscribe to the RSS feed for each document they have been invited to view by students. This allows them to monitor the progress being made and to ensure everything is going according to plan. One of the first ways I’m going to try this is with my Year 11 History group for past exam questions. I shall set the source-based exam questions along with the mark scheme, then go through the process outlined above.
Anyone care to join me? Any thoughts on the process? Should it be tweaked in any way? 
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This is a truly powerful way to build community in a class. Even more so if it uses students from different geographic locations. I wish I had a classroom of my own to do this. A student-centered classroom for sure. Out of curiosity are you planning to assess the critical learners role and hold them accountable in some way?
I would love to be involved Doug. I have just set up google apps for my faculty and had used google documents last year with my GCSE group for their coursework whic seemed to go reasonably well. I was certainly going to role it out, so all the students I teach have a google account access to my pupil google calander with key deadline dates and the ability to share key documents. the only trouble I am having is the lack of communication within ICT. I have managed to get it all unblocked one week and then the next its been blocked again because another technician feels that it harms the system security or allows pupils to instant message. I have just managed to get in on the strategic ICT group so hopefully can start to pull them away from their comfort blankets of lock it all down, and begin to use ICt in a more constructive and purposeful way.
Good look with your plans and keep us uptodate. I was also toying with using google apps as part of a connecting classrooms project for our language college bid.
Will
@Brian: Yes, the critical partners would be held accountable by a random sample (or even the whole cohort) being compared to the teacher’s final marks.
@Will: Random blocking and unblocking is very frustrating. I suggest you go straight to the top!
I’d like to match up with classes elsewhere as I think it could be a big motivating factor. Perhaps when we’ve got it a bit more embedded?
I’m in the process of setting up Google Apps for a Year 10 Geog group. I used Google Docs together with a wiki for a KS3 project last year, but I’m keen to develop the aspects of A4L along the lines you describe, possibly extending to make contact with another school on.
A couple of questions though - Did you activate the email service? I’m not sure I’ll get away with this, on the grounds that I am supposed to stick to the school & county email service (appalling Outlook) My initial experiments have led me to think that the process of sharing and viewing doesn’t require the email to be activated. Also - I’m being thick but I can’t see the RSS feed for the individual docs.
Cheers for the post Doug, I’m really inspired by this.
The email service in our school, quite bizarrely, doesn’t allow students access to their email outside of school. Seeing as I’m setting them homework where they’d have to use email I can get round that argument easily enough. I haven’t activated the chat feature though.
The RSS feed for individual docs is available when you go to the ‘revisions’ tab/page.
Glad I inspired you, Noel!
I think this is a fantastic idea Doug, I played with google docs&spreadsheets last year with a few classes but gave up due to frustrations (see above) and the fact that each student had to be able to:
a) know their email (provided by LEA grid for learning)
b) Know how to access their email and how to respond to the invitation.
Setting this up and walking them through it each time was too time consuming and meant that history lessons soon devolved into ICT lessons; though that’s more of a comment on basic ICT skills and turns the “digital native” label on it’s head than a criticism of google docs.
I’ve (hopefully) installed google docs on a domain; just waiting for verification and if it works as well as I hope then I’m going to suggest that we install it on the school site (currently in development) and save money on extra exchange license for student email addresses, i.e to make their gmail account (@school.com) the primary student email account. Whole-school use should see google apps for education being rolled out to other depts as well. Gold star to google and another to yourself DB!