Exploring Landforms with Google Street View

Today my students went swimming with turtles in the ocean, running with zebras on the plains, walking with camels in the desert, hiking with llamas in the mountains, and exploring with penguins on the polar ice caps.  My students went to all of these places in our classroom using technology on the Chromebook.

My students enjoy any type of project on the Chromebook, but they absolutely loved exploring different types of landforms with Google Street View.  The room was full of excitement as the students looked for examples of shelter, food, and clothing at different places around the world.  The students were eager to share what they found with their friends, and they made many connections on how a human's environment affects the way they live.

I created a Hyperdoc for the lesson (see below) and assigned it to the students in Google Classroom.  Each landform is numbered and labeled with a picture so that the students can easily follow along with the lesson.  Next to the landform is a link to Google Street View where the students can explore the landform in a virtual environment.  When students are done exploring, there is an empty box available for the students to respond to their virtual experience and write notes about what they encountered.  

One thing to be careful about when using Google Street View is that some links have trouble loading.  I knew this might be a problem because the page did not always load correctly when I was exploring Google Street View.  It is obvious when the page does not load correctly because there is a black screen.  Therefore, I taught the students that if the link did not load, they needed to close their tab and try again.  This required a lot of patience for the students because they were eager to explore each new landform.

If my class had access to Chromebooks everyday, I would break this lesson down into exploring one landform each day.  Sometimes all of the elements that the students were looking for (shelter, food, and clothing) were not in the given link that I assigned.  For the lesson, I would explore the assigned link for the landform together, and then give the students time to explore other destinations of the same landform in order to find more elements on how humans lives are different based on their environment.

After our virtual landform exploration, each student choose a landform and wrote about it in a collaborative Google Slide.  Check out our class eBook about landforms.  You can learn more about collaborative Google Slides here.

Chatting with Students on Google Slides (Using the Comment Feature)

Chatting with students is the most fun that I have had with a Chromebook project so far.  My students are working independently now, so I have the opportunity to sit back and give them feedback.  Through this activity, I really saw some of their personalities come out.

Google Slides does not really have a chat feature, but the program does allow you to comment on a student's slide, and the student can send a comment back to you.  This is a great opportunity to give positive feedback to the students as well as offer suggestions for improvement.  The students loved it when I sent them a message and were eager to reply back to me.  

The students would tell me when they sent me a message back.  Usually it would be a thank you or an ok like the picture above.  I would read these messages and move on without an reply; however, my students were disappointed when there was not a reply to their simple message.  Therefore, if Google is reading my post, I think it would be a good idea to add a like feature to the comment box so that a student's comment can be acknowledged easily.  This would make many of my students very happy.  Until then, it is best to acknowledge all of the students' messages with a simple reply or they will continue pestering you until you do.

I also liked to drop a few inside jokes in the comments for the students to enjoy (even though the students often didn't get my humor).  One of the students always used speech call-outs in her projects.  I was very surprised that she didn't use one in her project about the groundhog.  I nicely made the suggestion, and she revised her work.

Commenting with students works best with Google Slides.  Everyone is working on the same presentation, and it is easy to move back and forth between all of the students.  The commenting feature also works in Google Drawings, but it is hard to maintain because you have to open up each student's project individually.  I probably had a least 15 tabs opened at once, and my computer froze.

My next step in using the comment feature in Google Slides is to have students look at a completed presentation and give each other positive feedback through comments.  I think the students will enjoy chatting with each other, but I will have to closely monitor the conversations to make sure that they are treating each other with respect.  I will update you on how the it goes after I have the opportunity to test it out.

Using Google Slides to Publish Student Work

I really enjoy using Google Slides with students to publish their work and make class books.  It is nice to have all of the students working on one project together, and there is only one file that contains all of the students' work.  You can also watch the students work from your computer and give students feedback as needed.  Click here to see a class book that my students made about weather.

Working in Google Slides is a lot like working in Google Drawings.  Both programs have the same toolbar and share a lot of the same features.  Google Drawings is a great program to use to train your students on the features of Google because they are working on their own individual projects.  Click here to see a previous post in which I describe the steps that I take in training my students to use Google Drawings.  Once students are proficient with Google Drawings, they are ready to work collaboratively in Google Slides.

When your students begin working on a Google Slide presentation, it is important to assign them a number so they know which slide to begin working on.  The students in my class  are already assigned class numbers, and they know they start working on the slide that corresponds to their number.  There are a few exceptions.  Number 1 and number 2 are assigned different slide numbers because there is a title page and example page at the beginning of the presentation.

The first thing that students need to do when they find their slide is to type their name on the slide immediately.  Once the student types their name, they know that they are now working on the slide with their name on it, and the slide number no longer matters.  This is important when slides are accidentally deleted and the slide numbers change.  

While students are working, it is very important for them to stay on their own slide.  This is not the time for students to be messing with other student's work and changing things on someone else's slide.  My class knows that if they are working on someone else's slide beside their own, they will loose their Chromebook privileges for the day.

I do think that when students are more advanced and mature in their knowledge of technology, there will be great advantages in students working together on the same slides and helping each other.  However, while students are still in the early stages of learning about Google Slides, I think it is best for them to stay on their own slide for now.

With that being said, there are a few ways to monitor students and catch students who are being sneaky and changing things on someone else's slide.  I suggest teaching your students these collaborative features of Google so that they are aware if someone else is working on their slide, and they can help you monitor students who might be off task.

At the top of Google Slides, you can see who is working in the presentation.  If you click on a person's icon, it will immediately take you to where the person is working in the presentation.  This is a quick way to monitor if a person is working in the right place.

You can also move your mouse over the slides on the left side of the screen.  The slide will show who is currently working on that slide.  If there is only supposed to be one person working on each slide, then there should only be one icon on each slide.

The students really enjoy working together in Google Slides.  They also enjoy reading the other students' pages.  I usually print out the slides and put them in a binder for students to read in the classroom.  You can also assign the finished presentation as view only in Google Classroom if you want the students to view the presentation electronically without being able to change any of the presentation.  

I would love to see what you are doing in your classroom.  Please share any projects that you have created with your students using Google Slides. 

Lessons Learned from a Collaborative Google Slide Project

When I started this blog, I promised to share the good things that happen when teaching with technology as well as the bad.  Here is a chance for me to share a lesson that went horribly wrong.  Luckily, my mistakes will help you teach your collaborative learning lessons better.

Last week, we completed our first collaborative Google Slide Presentation making a class book entitled Snowman Building.  Each student created a snowman and wrote at least 3 sentences about their snowman.  The students started with a slide that looked like this:

The Google Slide Presentation was assigned using Google Classroom.  This time, instead of making a copy of the presentation for each student, each student was allowed to edit the same presentation.  Therefore, all of the students were working on one Google Slide Presentation at the same time.

The students in my classroom are assigned numbers.  I told the students to work on the slide that corresponded with their number.  The only exception to this rule were numbers 1 and 2.  I assigned these students numbers at the end of the presentation because slide one was the title page and slide two was the page that I used to model the project.

Once everyone had found their slide, they were allowed to move the different shapes around to build their snowman.  The students were given strict instructions to only work on their slide.  Once their snowman was built, the students were supposed to delete the snowman parts they did not use.  This is where the problems started.

If a student did not select an item correctly when they were deleting the snowman parts, they would delete the entire slide.  This would cause a panic in the classroom because not only did a student loose their work but all of the slide numbers changed; therefore, some of the students were no longer working on the slide number that they were assigned.  The deleted slide can be easily fixed with an undo as long as you can figure out who deleted the slide.  However, once a slide is deleted, it is best to have all students stop working until you can fix the problem.

The instructional technologist on my campus completed this same project with another first grade teacher's class.  Her solution for recovering a deleted slide was to have all of the students stop and press undo (control + z).  The missing slide would reappear, and it saved her from having to find the student who deleted the slide.  Thanks @RichesonEmily for this quick tip.

Another thing I would do differently to help ease student panic when a slide is deleted is for each student to type their name on their slide as soon as they start working.  With their name on the slide, the student is no longer depending on the slide number to identify their slide.  I would only use the slide number as a tool to help each student know which slide to begin working on.

Another problem that arose was a mischievous student who thought it would be funny to change another student's work.  At first, I heard some students complaining that things were happening on their slide that they did not do.  It is hard to catch a student who is being sneaky by just walking around the room.  Luckily, Google has built in ways in which you can see where other collaborators in the document are working and what they are doing.  Here are some tips on how to monitor your students in Google Slides:

1.  At the top of each page, there is a list of who is working in the presentation.  When you select a collaborator, it takes you to the place in the document where the person is working.  Therefore, you can quickly see if the student is working in the right place.

2.  You can also move your mouse over the slides to see who is working on what slide.  In the image below, you can quickly see that Student H is working on slide 5.  It sticks out like a sore thumb if more than one student is working on the same slide.

Even though this lesson caused a lot of frustration for me, it still turned out to be a very positive lesson.  Not only did the students learn something new, but I also learned a lot of things about working collaboratively on the same Google Slide Presentation together.  I hope you can benefit from my mistakes.  Here is a finished slide completed by a student:

Click here to see the completed class book.

*I would like to give credit to whoever created the original snowman presentation, but I cannot find the source on the internet.  I will continue to look and update this post when I find it.*