Google Sites - Beyond Teacher Websites

Over the past year, I have been talking about how creative teachers have been with their teacher Google Sites. This time, I am highlighting how the counseling department has decided to use a Google Site.

Every year, college representatives come to BHS so that students can meet with potential colleges/universities to hear what they have to say to give them a better idea of what that college/university is all about. At each of these meetings, a counselor attends the meeting with the students who have signed up. As the representative is talking, the counselor takes notes so that anyone can look at them in the future for a potential situation when a student has a question about that school.

This year, the counseling department decided to step it up and organize all of those notes on a Google Site so that parents and students can easily find information regardless if they were able to go to the meeting or not.

To View this Website, click HERE

Tools Used To Put It Together

• All work done in BHS Counseling Google Account
• Google Site - curating all of the notes
• Google Docs - template made for notes (copy of doc for each school)
• Google Drive - folder system created for organization of all notes

Note Taking

In order to make sure that information was not lost in different Google Drives, all counselors log into the BHS Counseling Google account. This is where all of the notes are taken. Mr. Rider, a counselor, created a template Google Document - so that there was consistency of how the documents looked. The counseling department got together to discuss how and what should be put on the document. He then created a folder called School Visits. Under that folder, he made a folder for each letter of the alphabet. This is for ease sake in finding the schools in the future. Then each week, Joe created a Doc for the schools that are visiting that week. The counselor on duty for the presentation would then log into the Counseling Google Drive to find the document with the school name on it in the appropriate alphabet letter folder to take notes. (Joe also makes sure that the link is live on the Google Site).

Creating Google Site

Again, the Google Site was created under the Counseling Google Account so that it was not tied to any specific person's account. After thinking it through the decision was made to customize the horizontal heading bar of the site so that all of the pages show at the top of the site. A page was created for each letter of the alphabet. Then, once the Google Document was created, Joe copies the link to the document (making sure sharing permissions is anyone with the link) and creates a sub page.

If you would like to learn how to manage the horizontal navigation bar in Google sites, watch the video below.

As a side note, I am also pleased to see the counseling department 'flipping' by creating videos for students and parents on how to use the tools that are required of them. On the Google Site, you will find that there is a video that shows students how to sign up in a program called Naviance so that they can attend College Visit meetings. Just another way of being efficient rather than have students ask how to sign up. The counseling department can now point them to the website for instructions.

There are many advantages to this new process:

• Parents, students, and teachers can find the information very easily
• There is consistency in what is looked for in the meetings
• The 'leg work' that Mr. Rider did this year will not have to be done next year as the counselors will just edit the document that was created this year
• Helped organized and streamlined the process

Just another example of how you can use a Google Site to share information to the community. I look forward to helping move our main school website off of a web service that we are currently using to Google Sites this year. Excited for the possibilities!

Of course, if you have any questions on how you can use Google Sites, you know where to find me.

Efficiencies in Sharing, Collecting & Grading Google Documents

We all know that the big Google buzz this school year has been about Google Classroom. Yet again, Google is doing what it can to help make teacher and student lives easier. With Google Classroom, Google has made it easy for teachers to be able to create a course to help elevate headaches of sharing information, documents and due dates with students. Prior to this, some teachers were using Doctopus, Goobric, Google Forms, and/or gClass Folders.

At the beginning of the school year, Google Classroom was still missing the ability for teachers to be able to grade electronically with a rubric. What I mean by this is once a teacher opens up a Google Document to assess, there was no ability to grade with an electronic rubric. (Obviously this will be helpful as schools start moving in the direction of doing things electronically.) Classroom allowed you to enter in a final grade if you wished to report to the student but the student was not able to see why they got what they got.

Andrew Stillman, creator of Doctopus and Goobric, made revisions to his product to allow the script to be integrated with Google Classroom. Why is this important to you you might ask? Well, the best part of using Doctopus (and Goobric) is that the electronic rubric that you assess the student is attached to the bottom of the Google Document. In other words, once you open the student's document, you can attach the rubric right to it. An email is even sent to the student to notify them the results of the rubric. How does this work?

• You create an assign an assignment in Google Classroom. 
• You then create a rubric a specific way in Google Sheets (Doctopus gives you those parameters)
• Once the assignments have been collected, you create a blank Google Sheet and open an add-on in a blank Google Sheet called Doctopus
• You follow the steps of Doctopus so that all of your students have the rubric 'assigned' to their document.
• You open up student work and grade using the rubric electronically.
• Once done with grading that one student, rubric is attached to document and email is sent to student.

A couple of weeks ago, the New Hampshire Google Education Group ran a Google Hangout On Air with the major focus of Doctopus and Google Classroom. I asked our very own Jennifer Baney, Physics Teacher at BHS, if she would be willing to join in on the conversation as I knew she was an expert in using these tools. In fact, Baney originally was only going to use Google Classroom with one of her classes until she discovered that Doctopus worked with it. (She has been using Doctopus now for at least a year). Now she is using Google Classroom with all of her classes.

To view this Google Hangout, click HERE.

**Doctopus Conversation starts 28 minutes into the Hangout**

**Please note that this was NH GEG first Hangout On Air - so it will not be polished.**

In the Hangout Jennifer Lowton (@jllowton) gives an explanation of Doctopus and how it can be used outside of Google Classroom for those teachers who have not used Classroom or do not plan on using it. Jennifer Baney gives more explanation of how she uses it with Google Classroom as well as provides insight of how she creates documents to push out to students. Some ideas that she recommends to teachers (and I would second these suggestions):

• When creating a document for students, provide space that you want them to type in. Maybe change the color and/or font so that when they start typing in that spot it looks different from your instructions on the document. This will be easier for you when you are grading electronically.
• Another way to help break up your instructions and student work is to create tables where you want students to type so that it will show up in a 'text box'.
• When you want students to be able to annotate pictures/images/graphs, please those images in a drawing right in a Google Doc. By doing this, students would double click on an drawing so that they can 'annotate' it.

Jennifer Baney has been very creative in how she uses Google Documents with her Physics students and I commend her on that! If you have any questions on using Google Classroom and/or Doctopus with your courses, you know where to find me.