Thing 6: Online Collaboration Tools

I have discovered that conferences are a great time to work on "things" for MILI! The article "Marking work in Google Docs" gave me some ideas.

I tried google docs as a tool with the other teachers on my team without much success. There were a lot of problems with the "invitations" that I tried to send out. This was very disheartening to me because I wanted to collaborate with my team in creating meeting agendas. I had pretty much given up on google docs.

This article gave me hope. I would like to give google docs another try with history day. I don't think I will involve ALL students, but I would like to make this option available for the students who are highly motivated and driven. That is what I have learned about history day: there are some tools that I need to make available for ALL students and other tools need to be saved for those students that really connect with the project. With google docs, I could involve other teachers in the review process. Groups could work on their projects and then share them with me, Jeanne, our gifted and talented coordinator, language arts teacher, etc...it would allow them to receive lots of valuable feedback. Something worth piloting this year! We'll see how it goes:)