Teacher inquiries into using Google docs

The teacher inquiries covered a large range of topics, and within those topics there was some really outstanding evidence being used. One of the good tools that are being used is Google Documents, and a group of teachers have been using Google Documents and the forms to have an online forum of gaining quick responses to questions. So what they’ve done is they have set up forms online, Google forms, and they have linked them to our LMS which is Moodle, and on Moodle, the students can click on the link and they have a form come up which has an excellence or merit question and they can type in their answer and click submit. Now from that it goes straight to an Excel spreadsheet, and the teachers were using that to get quick information from the students of their level of understanding and then to provide feedback for the students. So from that, the students within a day had written their excellence question and they had received their answer with modification and with change. And the more powerful thing to that was the whole class did the activity, and the whole class saw everyone’s questions being re-posted online. I think ultimately that process is an excellent way of formatively feeding back to the students and to constantly find where they are at with their learning. Another interesting project that came to light with our feedback to our staff was a couple of groups were actually modifying their schemes online and using shared docs in Google Docs. So they were setting up their scheme within Google Docs and they had different teachers modifying them using ICT tools, and ideas, and resources. It was cross the departments, cross faculties, and there were teachers who normally wouldn’t be involved with modifying those documents becoming involved, so that was powerful as well.