Project Implementation Blog

On April 27, my colleague and I worked with her seven resource room students to teach them about Google Docs and create Google Accounts with them so that they could begin to create a paper together as a class. We had her class come into my room during my planning hour to take advantage of the mobile laptop cart and Promethean board. I did a quick demo with the students on what Google Docs are and why we wanted them to be able to use them. I explained the benefits of having an online document in which they could all write. I then showed them how to sign up for accounts. After demonstrating with the Promethean board, we gave the student laptops to set up their Google Accounts so that they could access a document that we wanted to share with them. 

The first hiccup was making the accounts. Only two of her students had emails that they could use to set up a Google Account via Docs. We struggled to have the other five create accounts without an email address. We wanted to get them Gaggle email accounts but our media specialist let us know that we had maxed-out for accounts for the year (our school has a free version of Gaggle). In order to improvise we read the support pages offered by Google and found that the kids could get a Google Account without having their own email if they signed up for Gmail. Unfortunately, however, Gmail is blocked by our school! I did not anticipate having these account set-up issues because I took for granted that her students would already have had other email accounts they could use to set up the Google Account. I would recommend to other teachers wanting to use Google Docs that they first make sure that their students have accessible email accounts. 

We panicked for a moment, but then found a solution: we decided that we would just share the document we had started with the students without having them have their own accounts. I ran to my computer, hit freeze on the Promethean, and quickly made the document accessible to all with editing privileges. I copied the link to share and pasted it on this blog for her students to access. With the whiteboard unfrozen, I shared the link to my blog and had the students navigate to there to access the link. 

Problem solved? No. Yes, the students were able to get to the link and open the Doc, but only the two who had accounts were seeming to have any success typing in it. For whatever reason, several of the other students kept getting a yellow highlighted message that Google was temporary unavailable due to the server. At this point her students were becoming a bit frustrated. They could see what others were typing in the document, but they could not yet type in it. My colleague and I, though, kept calm and continued to work through these unforeseen challenges. She said to me after the class that she was glad that her students saw us adults struggling with the technology but not freaking out. She mentioned that it was positive for them to see how we relentlessly engaged in problem-solving strategies :)

By the end of the hour, all of the kids got to the document without their own Google Accounts, though not all of them could actually type in it all of the time. When they could type though, they were excited to see how they could ask questions and respond to their peers in the document live. 

It turns out that Google Docs isn't yet perfect. In the future, I would better prepare my approach to either have students with email accounts that I am sure of create accounts, or just share an open and editable document with them via a blog posting that they can easily access. 

When we try again this week, we are not going to ask the students to retry making accounts. My colleague is going to open the document in her room with the projector, discuss the writing process, and then have kids come to her computer to type into the sample paper. Then we will share a copy of the paper via Google Docs with each student and have them begin typing in their own document to which she will have access for discussion, peer editing and grading. 

One final note: we desperately need all students to have reliable and accessible email accounts. Now that the year comes to a close and we are out of Gaggle User keys, we are facing challenges such as the one we experienced. I would really like to see all of our students have Gmail accounts. I would be curious to know what other schools do who don't have school-provided email accounts for their kids.