This week, instead of having my students complete a worksheet on spectroscopy and ground vs. excited states of electrons, I asked them to read a technical (complex) text and answer a series of questions in paragraph form. The impetus for this came after a discussion with Maria Vowles who commented that her IB Biology students (seniors) struggled with 'answering the question' in an essay. Often times students will simply rephrase the question several times rather than answer it. They'll dance around the answer without ever actually getting to the point.
Enter
Google Drive for the iPad. I flipped the lesson on the topic of Ground vs. Excited state so the students had a background of the topic. I handed out an article on 'Taking Apart the Light' and instructed them to read the article and, instead of simply answering four questions at the end of the reading, to construct a thoughtful response via Google Drive. They all read the article and tapped a response on their iPads. A paragraph is probably the extent of writing that I would expect students to compose without an external keyboard.
Once they had composed their answers, I asked them to share the document with me and allow me the ability to
COMMENT on them. Then I could read their paragraphs, comment on them, and grade them all electronically. I'm trying to get into more 'e-grading'.
As many of you know, Google Drive allows you to create folders to organize your shared documents. This is crucial with 90+ paragraphs to sift through.
The drawbacks of the App? Right now, you cannot comment on shared documents AND you cannot view comments. Instead, I have to read and comment on the documents on my laptop of home desktop computer. I submitted feedback to Google on this. Not holding my breath for the update. However, I think it's a pretty slick way for kids to create content and cut down on the papers that I have to shuffle.
