Collaboration

One of the things I have been getting my middle school students to do is collaboration on documents for their work. And it has worked out surprisingly well! Some of the tools we ave used for collaboration are: Google Docs, Google slides, Padlet, and just collaborating inside of Edmodo.
The Google products are very easy to use because of the larger work area. Although the doc was tricky since I limited them to keeping all the work on one page. Padlet is a nice area to share information. Depending on the layout of the posts (I used stream) this can have an effect on the organization. One of my favorite collaboration projects was to work in their small group in Edmodo doing research about the history of Big Tex. Their group had to divide the jobs up and only one person could input the information on the timeline. (We use the timeline from ReadWriteThink. Excellent resource.) The info that they found had to be posted in their small group for the Timeline person. They also had to find links to images to use. The project worked well and everyone's timelines turned out nicely. I believe that teaching students to work in collaborative groups is an important skill and helps them become an asset to their future employers.

Google Doodles

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=ww

So I totally admit this is not a cool web tool for education but being a Star Trek fan I found the Google Doodle today pretty awesome.

Although- I do think Google Doodles can be a great spring board to discussions. I always keep Google as my default homepage so when I turn on my projector I don't have to worry about some less desirable story showing up in front of my class. (Thank you Google for that.) Many times there has been a Google Doodle that either myself or someone in the class will notice and comment wondering what it is about. So naturally we have to click and go investigate. We have had some great learning moments that might not have been what I planned to do in class that day, but we all walked away having gained knowledge we didn't have before.

You can even search Google Doodles and view past ones. Something to use perhaps as an introduction to a lesson.

So don't just zip past that Doodle! Teach out of the box once in a while.