From the course: Teaching Techniques: Blended Learning

Design blended courses with Google Apps

From the course: Teaching Techniques: Blended Learning

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Design blended courses with Google Apps

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- Creating a community of inquiry begins with open communication and collaboration. Google Apps provides a great foundation for sharing technologies for you to begin building your community with. Designing a blended course to take advantage of these tools requires rethinking how collaboration can take place within your face-to-face class and carry forward to online work. Designing projects and activities where everyone gets comfortable contributing is the first key to success. Get students oriented to the tools and creating content together from the very beginning of your course. Tap into creative interests and passions by encouraging students to create and embed video within shared documents such as images, animations, audio, video, and creative writings related to your course. Leverage the unique skills each student brings to the table as well as the technologies they likely have in their pockets. Using cellphones to take pictures of drawings and diagrams, record audio descriptions, or creating short videos can be an excellent way for students to ignite their creativity and engagement with the materials and each other. Encouraging students to link to and embed media found on the Web brings additional resources into your class and opens the opportunity to discuss issues such as intellectual property, copyright, and critical evaluation of content. In this chapter, we'll explore many of the primary Google productivity and collaboration apps with a focus on sharing. To get started, let's begin by sharing content via Google Drive.

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