Using Google Drive as a University Lecturer

29 Jan 2014   | Learning Technology

I run a lot of short courses, both for academia and business, and one of the most popular is a week long introduction to cloud applications. Cloud apps, such as Google Drive and Evernote, can make such a difference to your productivity that it’s just silly to ignore them, despite some of the possible downsides around privacy and security.

This is particularly important in academia, when you’re dealing with student and university data, but if you’re careful with how you use it, then they can help both you and your students in huge ways.

One of the tasks on my cloud apps course is to put together a few suggestions on how the participants think they might use Google Drive in their university teaching. This page forms an archive of those suggestions, and hopefully will inspire you to get signed up and start using Drive for all sorts of innovative teaching tasks.

If you have any other suggestions that you can’t find below, just fire them into the comments – I’d love to hear them!

Google Drive Idea: I don’t teach students, so I am going off-piste here slightly (sorry if that’s not in the rules!) –  I work collaboratively with colleagues throughout the University a lot – for example in drafting papers for Committees, or drafting University procedures and I can see that there is a lot of potential for using google-drive to do this more effectively (and to reduce clogging up email inboxes with attachments of documents in a variety of versions!) I am really excited by the video to see all the young people collaborating with each other over the internet and one wonders what this will eventually lead to in terms of results from their collaboration. Beneficial for student and teacher, I would think.

Creating a Group Report: Students doing group work can use a Google document to put together their assignment paper. They can all work on it at the same time, review each other’s sections, add content to their own and never have to worry about version control or tying it all together at the end.

Editing idea: The most obvious use for me is the one that Colin has suggested.  However, I’ve just finished editing a conference programme, which has been flying back and forth among committee members with an ever increasing version number to ensure we’re all looking at the latest one.  With Google docs, we would be able to access and edit a single version of the document, ensuring that everyone was always working on the most up to date document.

Court Reports: For the students this will be a great way of agreeing how to word a court report. The way to reduce unnecessary waffle and cut to the chase, as well as the correct way to use grammar and getting spelling correct, will be invaluable. In fact, it is an excellent way for the teacher to be watching over everyone’s shoulder at once and just making one correction instead of everyone making the same mistakes and each one having to be corrected separately!! Hooray!

Create a Collaborative Wikipedia Entry: Working as a team, students could write an accurate, scholarly piece for Wikipedia. The students can use the Google doc to prepare the article in advance.

Collaborative Critique: Working as a team, students can all access a document and work together to criticise the content. I plan to propose a series of experimental designs to test hypotheses and ask groups to identify flaws and improvements.

Recording Research: Students can record their research in a single location in collaborative film projects, which can be monitored by myself. I can also use the same space to provide feedback and suggestions on their research efforts.

Group Sign-up Sheets: I can finally get students to sign up for tutorials on a sign-up sheet – in the past I used to post a sign-up sheet on a noticeboard but students now forget to check the noticeboard as I mainly communicate with them on Moodle and I haven’t worked out if there is a tool on Moodle that would help with this.

Collating Research Data: Students can use a spreadsheet to collate data that they are all responsible for gathering and recording for a group project, which would then be analysed independently. One issue that is common to all group work situations is that they are dependent on all group members pulling together and performing their different roles. In the absence of face-to-face meetings there may be a greater risk of group members drifting, which impacts on the whole group performance.

colinmcgray

Colin Gray is a web designer, internet marketer, small business development advisor, elearning lecturer and current PhD student. Find out more about Colin Gray, or contact him on Google+