January 22nd: Am I Smarter Than A Seventh Grader?

Probably not. At least not when it comes to all things techy. I often tell my students that we are smarter together than we can be separately, and this morning I asked them to help me figure something out...and they were brilliant!!

We've been using Google Apps for Education this year, and I, for one, have been loving it! My students use Google Sites for their blogs, I use Google Forms to create surveys, and we use Google Docs, but definitely not to their fullest capacity. So I asked my seventh graders this morning for more ideas of ways we could use Google Docs in the classroom. It was a little quiet at first, but once they got rolling...as they always do...they came up with some amazing ideas! Here are just a few:

• Brainstorming: working together to come up with ideas for projects or fundraisers;
• Student council: the class reps could share their report with their classmates and then ask for feedback or questions;
• They could post math problems and then no one would have to take their textbook home (I don't know about that one);
• They could create a class study guide for the next test;
• Literature Circles: I'm still thinking about this one! Looking forward to trying to use Docs with literature circles. Should make it much easier for groups to collaborate;
• My Favorite: Teachers could make forms available to students now that we can upload to Google Docs. That way, there's no excessive waste of paper, students could look at project handouts and rubrics online whenever they need it (like after they've lost their handout AGAIN!)
  

I absolutely loved getting geeky with my seventh graders this morning! This class is amazing in that they can always come up with great ideas!