These weeks since our meeting have been a blur. OHCHS has been going through the accreditation process and the NEASC committee visited November 14-17. This required a Sunday at school for presentations and interviews and we've had several extra staff and committee meetings due to the finalizing reports and receiving the follow-up preliminary report. Our school is in a precarious position for several reasons, and I've been preoccupied and remiss in posting blogs.

But, my inquiry has continued, so here is an update.

I am feeling much more comfortable using Google Docs and am particularly liking the fact that students can no longer give me the excuses for missing assignments like, “My printer is broken” or ‘My computer crashed and I lost my entire project.” The students have lost the ability to make these excuses; if they did the work, we can access it from any computer. If they forgot their login information (which rarely happens now) I have the sealed envelops that they gave to me with this information on the day of our account set up for my for the team.

The science teacher on my team lost his infant daughter just before school opened and he was out on bereavement leave for the first month of school. He came back just after I had gotten all of our students set up with accounts and he was very enthusiastic to try it too. He’s a bit more tech savvy than I am, so he has helped me with some issues. The other day he showed me how to “Hide” assignments after they’ve been graded and filed.

I created folders for each class and inside each class folder I add a folder for each assignment. I was placing assignments into folders by using the drop down menu, but last week realized that I can just open a folder in the left column and drag and drop assignments into the correct inside folder much faster.

A friend was visiting while I was grading some papers on irony in short stories. I felt like I kept writing the same comments over and over, like “Always name your assignment so it so doesn’t show up as “Untitled”, and “Titles of short stories are in quotations as opposed to titles of books that are underlined or italicized.” I was grumbling, “I wish this program had canned comments so that I could just click on the comment and it would be inserted instead of writing the same thing over and over. He suggested that I create a Google Doc with common comments and to star it so that I could find it easily when grading assignments. Still, he commented that Google could probably put a feature in for inserting canned comments.

I am finding that with the features of inserting comments, using strike-throughs and being able to color code text, I am actually spending more time on individual writing and discovering each student’s personal idiosyncracies as a writer. Some common examples are failure to place ones’ self last in a sentence like “Me and my friend always hang out together on weekends“, not knowing when to use and apostrophe and where in singular and plural possessives, not capitalizing appropriately, or just listing details instead of using and example and supporting it with the correct details.

What is not going so well is getting students to go back into documents and revise them based on my suggestions. I am going to have to do a demonstration on that soon and will have to encourage them to make revisions ASAP when they see that I have commented and made suggestions or see that an assignment remains “Incomplete” in their portal and has a comment, “Needs revision for a grade”.

Another feature that is missing is the ability to comment on presentations. I can insert speaker notes only and that’s not what the Speaker Notes feature is for, so students wouldn’t see my comment unless they clicked on the Speaker Notes button. What I have done is share the presentation back to the creator(s) and send an attached message with my comments. It would be nice to be able to insert comments on individual slides just as I am able to comment on text documents.

I am so pleased to not be carrying tons of paperwork home on a regular basis! I also like the search feature where I can search a student’s name or the title of an assignment and everything written by that student pops up or every assignment with that title is all in one place to either file or correct.