Effective teaching practices using free Google services: conference tutorial

In this 90-minute tutorial, we will share our experiences using free Web services from Google in order to maximize teaching effectiveness. Participants will engage with these services as part of the tutorial. We have used and studied these technologies, and we have developed best practices for using them to facilitate student inquiry and learning. Specific technologies that will be discussed include: • Reader. Reader is an online feed aggregator that includes sharing and social functions that integrate well with course-related activities. For example, through the use of specially designed "bundles," an instructor can easily share articles and collections of syndicated feeds with students, allowing them to explore content related to a given course, where they can make timely connections to primary sources. The "Note in Reader" bookmarklet and tagging functions allow instructors to move any kind of Web content into course Reader bundles without the hassle of adding a new feed. This allows instructors to target speci c items to course discussions throughout a unit or quarter/semester. • Sites. Sites is a user-friendly tool for creating public or private Web sites. The access control mechanism allows for shared ownership of the space between instructors and students, making it an excellent tool for promoting student projects and collaborative learning. It can also be used for wiki-style collaborative knowledge work, but without the need to install and maintain a Web server. • Buzz. Though ostensibly a social networking application positioned somewhere between Facebook and Twitter, Buzz integrates well with both Reader and Sites. For example, comments on items shared through Reader are also viewable in Buzz, creating more opportunity for backchannel discussion around items related to the course. Buzz can also act as a microblogging or project management platform, complementing work in Reader or Sites. • Alerts. Alerts enable systematic daily searching of a given topic or phrase, with push delivery of the most relevant results. Alerts can be particularly useful for students searching for specific (or esoteric) items and researching trends about those items throughout the stages of a given project. • Groups. Groups provides the core functionality of a mailing list together with collaborative, wiki-style page editing and lesharing. Groups can be especially useful for project management within student-driven collaborative teams. • Wave. Wave is a collaborative and extensible writing environment. Recently opened to the public, during preview testing we have found Wave to be a valuable environment for managing student-directed, project-oriented learning experiences, as well as for research coordination. • Docs. Docs is a suite of o ce productivity tools, but the Web-centric nature of the suite provides powerful teaching opportunities. The ability to seamlessly share documents among multiple users allows project teams to collaboratively edit rich text documents and spreadsheets, while an instructor can easily survey the progress of teams. For example, our students have used Docs spreadsheets to maintain risk matrices of semester-long projects, and the instructor can monitor their management of risk in terms of both the document's content and the frequency of change. Docs also contains a simple and free mechanism for distributing anonymous surveys, and we have used this to elicit feedback from students during the semester as well as in human subjects research.