The second part of my project is based around trying to find a solution to a problem I encountered at school last academic year, and envision having for the near and foreseeable future whilst teaching.
Up until last year, neither I, nor many of my colleagues had ever shared courses of study. Before, the common practice was to give each teacher responsibility for every class of a certain subject. For example, in the academic year of 2009-2010, I taught all three of the Grade 11 Economics course but in the year 2010-2011, I taught one of the three, with one of my colleagues teaching the other two.
A problem we encountered was in the sharing and editing of shared resources such as cornerstone and major assessments which were common across the course to enable us to maintain consistency of learning and assessment throughout the subject area. To create these documents, we held weekly meetings to brain storm ideas and format, then, one of us would start to draft the document. This was then the stage where we encountered three main difficulties:
- The first issue we encountered was one of compatibility. I have MS Office 2010 on my machine where as one of my colleagues had MS Office 2003. My default documents are saved as .docx files and her machine sadly could not read them and she didn’t have the compatibility patch installed. I would frequently draft documents, email them over and go to bed early whilst my colleague then spent half the night trying to open it and contact me to no avail to re-format the document and re-send it.
- The second issue we encountered was the “tennis” emailing of documents back and forth, trying to keep up-to-date with which draft we are working on and what changes have been made, and by who. This was especially difficult as we had just migrated to a new email service provider and we were unfamiliar with the mail filing system and during heavy times of the year, email were easily missed between us and amendments not seen.
- The final issue was on timing and dates. Initially, we wrote completion dates and due dates for assignments but sometimes, this were not written or forgotten about and as a result, different expectations were expected of the students.
To counter these issues, I have drafted a plan to move all our future collaborative planning to “The Cloud” via Google Apps. As explained before, my school is a Moodle, not Google Apps school and this interface is not conducive to effective time management and shared document editing.
I originally planned to just use Google Docs and Google Calendar to facilitate this sharing but I believe that by also incorporating Google sites, we can create a feeling of shared ownership over the documents rather than just a sense of editing each other’s work.
Next year I will be collaborating on two subject, Grade 12 Business Studies and Grade 10 History. I have set up a Google Site for the Business course and have started to migrate documents from my MS Word Collection into Google Docs, ready for sharing.
In Google Sites, I have created some pages for each of the units of study which can be seen in orange in the upper left of the above picture and each of them had an option of what type of page they could be. There are four options of page type:
Through trial and error, I found the best format for a page of this type (sharing documents) to be the filing cabinet as it allows you to upload files from Google Docs or from your computer (if you made it in an alternate word processing tool before). Personally, I am uploading all my documents to Google Docs so I input the documents from there.
One can see five documents present in the filing cabinet, when they were uploaded, and who uploaded them. The management of the documents is extremely easy as you literally just press the “+add” button to upload a file:
It is as simple as either selecting the source folder on your PC or the URL of the Google Doc that you are selecting and takes seconds to perform (depending upon your Internet connection). The beauty of using Google Docs in this way is that there will be no compatibility issues as we will both be using the same document, opened using Google Docs’ document program.
The process is almost finished now except for two crucial aspects that come under the same umbrella. Sharing.
In order for this to work, firstly, the Google Site must be shared with a colleague / collaborator as must the document.
By selecting the “More actions” tab in the top right corner, one can share the Google Site by selecting site permission. When you click this, the following box appears (see image below) and you see who currently has Site permissions and their type of access: ie either viewer, editor, or as an owner or co-owner of the site. If they have ownership status, they can actually change the layout, theme etc. within the Site which is probably best to leave as moderated by one person only.
Once the site is created and the users’ privileges set, you can choose whether to make the site publicly available or keep it private to those listed or add more users in the “Add people” box. Now you have shared the Site, you have to share documents. If you are sharing multiple documents, this process is easily accomplished in Google Docs. After setting up a number of documents, they can all be transferred into what Google call a “Collection,” which is essentially a folder in non-Google language. In this collection, you can choose to share individual files or, if you are collaborating on the entire collection, you can select to just share the entire collection with another user.
You can see in this image that all you have to do is input an email address to share the document with the person / people (best to use other Gmail addresses) and you can choose whether the person is a viewer, editor or owner of the document.
The “Can edit” function is useful for sharing the document between classroom teachers but by using the viewer option, you can include other teachers or administrators in the site without them actually being able to edit the documents. This could be useful if teachers have to submit weekly or topical lesson plans and is an easy way for administrators / department chairs to view them. Any shared document will appear in the user’s Google Docs gallery and it is possible to either mail all or some of the users of the document, or make requests for access of editing rights to the owners.
After all the documents have be shared, new documents can easily be added to the collaboration and edited whilst making master copies for teachers who join in the future. This sharing aspect in Google Sites means that we have one fixed file location and will prevent us from having to email the documents back and forth as they are there, ready to be viewed or edited and will reflect any alterations immediately.
The final aspect of my collaboration plan is to have a live calendar which can be updated by any user, and linked to each user. In Google Apps, we can set up multiple calendars which are shareable with others. For this purpose, I set up a “Business Studies” calendar in my account and embedded it in to the home page of the Google Site. I then shared this calendar in the same way as I shared the prior documents and the user can choose to integrate it within their own calendar. To be able to differentiate between different meetings and / or deadlines, one can set different colors for different calendars. By placing the calendar on the home page, we are instantly reminded every time we log in of upcoming deadlines and / or assignment due dates, tests etc. Again, this could be a great tool to share with your department chairs and administrators, again as viewers so they can see what you are doing in the class and when different work is due. By embedding the calendar, I have believe I have solved some of the collaboration headaches that come with scheduling.
During this process, I did encounter a few problems, but, by playing around and by “Googling” the problem, I did find easy answers to my problems. One of the greatest problems was the time zones on calendars.
You can set your Google account to be in a time zone and every thing you set up will be in that time zone apart from when you embed a calendar in Google Sites. You have to separately change the Google Sites time zone (which defaults on Pacific Time) in Google Sites.
If you select the wagon wheel under the spanner, you can select “User Settings” and change the default to your time zone. This stops any early morning meetings or deadlines from occurring in the evening of the day before!
A final, very useful tool in Google Apps is that you can “Subscribe to Changes” in the site where you will receive a notification if someone moves, deletes or adds a document to the page. This is very useful as you then know if there is another document for you to look at or you need to edit.
All in all, I think that the use of Google Apps – in particular Docs, Sites and Calendar – will help to streamline the collaborative process in my courses and department and may help to pave the way to moving Google Apps across the school. I believe that the use of the Cloud, through Google is more reliably possible now that my school has upgraded its Internet provider, increased its bandwidth, as well as us being able to access the documents in any classroom in the school through the new classroom desktops. The beauty of the idea also allows us to access these Cloud based documents on any computer, anywhere in the world and now even whilst lying on the beach using a borrowed laptop or on your iPad2!
