Written by I chose the project, because I want to learn more about Google Docs. What I know about it so far: It’s everywhere. It’s free. It’s growing in popularity. It’s not used in a second grade classroom that I’m aware of. I want to learn how to use Google Docs because it’s widely used in the upper elementary grades and is widely used throughout the upper school. I believe it can be used in an effective way in second grade too.
My initial plan is to create some type of collaborative project. I would like to create a classroom newspaper or research paper put together by students working collaboratively in small groups. I was inspired by what I heard from Laura Chesebro (http://inside.isb.ac.th/rm207/).
What are the benefits of a second grade student learning how to use GDocs? The most obvious reason I’ve seen is that GDocs are used in just about every grade level from third to twelfth grade. Another benefit of GDocs is the potential for building a living portfolio that automatically documents a student’s progress throughout the years. Finally, GDocs have implications that reach well beyond schooling. GDocs have a presence in the business world and personal realm as well.
Potential drawbacks? Students need an email to create an account and this may turn out to be an issue for second graders, because of administrative policies. I submitted a request last week…fingers crossed. Collaborating on a single document may turn out to be too confusing. Having ones peers authoring one section of a document while another is writing something on another portion of the same page may end up being too distracting.
In the end, my goal is simply to learn more about the potential benefit of using Google Docs in a second grade classroom.
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