GOOGLE SEARCH

A lot of classrooms have and will continue to have textbooks. They are an important part of the
classroom and will not be disappearing any time soon. But that does not mean you cannot further
engage your students and make connections to the real world. As teachers and master learners, we
all know that getting stuck is part of the learning process. To continue learning, it is essential that we
know what to do when we are stuck. It is important to build this skill in our students. Being able to
search and find information is probably one of the most valuable skills today. You can find relevant,
timely, high-quality content online if you know effective search strategies. You can always begin
searching for answers using Google Search. If you write your problem in the search box, chances are
that one of the first few webpages you find will have the right answer. What's more, Google Search is
also where most of our students go when they have a question. Using search operators or advanced
search settings can be a great place to start. Consider sending students on a quest using Google
Search and their new understanding of search operators. They will have fun trying to answer
questions and will develop their search skills at the same time. Understanding how to use this tool
efficiently will benefit all learners in the classroom, including us as educators. While Google tools are
intuitive and easy to use, it is inevitable that you will eventually have questions. Luckily, answers are
easy to find. Get yourself unstuck with Google Search, the Google Help Center, and the Google for
Education Help Forums. With a few simple search strategies, you can find answers quickly and get
back to creating amazing learning experiences for your students. By the way address bar is also
known as omnibox.

GOOGLE DRIVE

Over the years the different ways we have saved our information and files has changed. Anybody
remember floppy disks? Writable CDs were around for a while and many of us have used USB drives
at some point in our lives. Things continue to change and today more people are using cloud storage
to save their information. Cloud storage is basically a computer connected to the Internet that we can
save our information to by ‘Uploading’ what we want to save. You can access the information you
uploaded to the cloud by logging in to your account, whether you are online or offline. If you are using
Google Drive, make sure to enable offline storage for those times when you do not have internet
connectivity. Any changes you make will automatically save the next time you connect to the internet.
Google Drive is like an online hard drive where you can store all your files from stories, designs,
drawings, recordings, videos to anything. When you use Google Drive, all of the documents, pictures,
and videos you upload are automatically accessible via any computer, tablet, or mobile device. This
anytime, anywhere access gives you the ability to share documents and folders, reduces your need to
print content and, (extra bonus!) reduces anxiety because your documents are not going to be lost.
After all, the cloud storage servers that host our information have back-up systems and security
measures in place to keep our data safe and available. As part of G Suite for Education, Drive has
unlimited storage, so you and your students don’t have to worry about full disks, deleting old files, or
losing anything when a computer crashes. You can access your files from any device, and, best of all,
you never have to save. Drive automatically saves every time you make an edit.
GOOGLE DOC

Google Docs come to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and
paragraphs. You can choose from thousands of fonts, add links, images, drawings, and tables. The
most popular feature of Google Docs is the ability for multiple students to edit the same document at
the same time. In class, students can use Google Docs to create collaborative work. One of the
example is collaborative story telling where each student rotates through the document and adds
another short paragraph to take the story further along. Other users can be added with permissions
that allow them to comment and make suggested edits. Peer writing can be work-shopped. As
students work through the comments and suggestions, they are able to reply, resolve, accept, or
reject what others have suggested. This gets them thinking about their writing at a higher level.

GOOGLE SLIDES

Google Slides can be an awesome presentation tool that makes it easy to tell stories. Presentations
and speaking are a big part of many curriculum areas across all grade levels. Google Slides can be
used to organize information to be shared in engaging and creative ways. You can add graphics to
slides using the Insert Images option. Students can also collaborate on the same slide deck and use
different themes and master slide templates to ensure consistency. However, slides do not have to be
just about presentations, either. Consider adding hyperlinks within a slide deck and have users run
through the presentation on their own computers. You can link to external sites or even to other slides
within the same presentation to give an interactive experience.

GOOGLE FORM

Google Forms helps teachers and students collect and analyze data quickly and easily. Forms can
make use of a variety of question types to gather information in an organized manner. Forms can also
be customized and personalized. All responses are automatically collected in a Google Sheet, which
makes data analysis easier. Google Forms has many benefits for all. One great way to use Google
Forms is to create a quiz as a quick assessment of your students’ knowledge. These quizzes are a
perfect activity when class is just beginning or can be used as an exit ticket before students leave
class. When students engaged in their learning, concepts will be relevant to them and retained longer.
You can encourage group collaboration and reflection by inviting students to work with each other as
they answer the questions. Google Forms also provides a quick and easy way to collect other data
from students such as attendance, assignments, behavior reports, clubs and extracurricular activities
or a database of student and parent contact information. Forms aren’t just for teachers, though.
Students can also get involved in creating and using Google Forms by building surveys to collect
research data for individual or group project.
There are a number of tools built into Google Sheets that allow teachers to organize, sort, and filter
the data about students to accurately reflect how well they are learning. Google Sheets is flexible
enough to import data from existing spreadsheets and customize it to meet your needs. You can
create a new spreadsheet and edit it with others at the same time from your computer, phone or tablet
via Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are used for analyzing, visualizing, and charting data. In schools, a
lot of data is gathered on student performance and is used by teachers to plan and support individual
students. Having this data is a great first step, but it does not mean much until it is analyzed. After
analysis is complete, the next step is to share and communicate that information with parents and
other teachers. One of the easiest ways to do this is to visually represent the data with graphs and
charts. After creating graphical representations of student performance, the information needs to be
shared. As important as it is to collect student data to analyze, it is equally important for educators to
be able to share the results in meaningful ways and decide which format is best suited to your
students’ data. Throughout each semester, teachers collect information on student performance. If we
are able to visualize these results over time we might be able to draw conclusions about each
student’s learning. There may be other things that have impacted a student on a particular day.
However, it may be more telling to see if there is a general up or down trend over time. If we see a
student slipping then we can intervene and get the student back on track before it’s too late.