Today in Class, I Assigned and Discussed the Students Next Project, Which Is Researching

Parents,

Today in class, I assigned and discussed the students’ next project, which is researching background information for our reading of The Pearl by John Steinbeck. This will be done using their Google Drive accounts. For this assignment, each student was given atopic to research and asked to develop a slide to contribute to a combined class presentation. Each combined class presentation is a live document that can be edited by students within each class period.

Once students log into their Google Drive accounts, they will click on “Incoming” to access their respective class presentations. There, each student will be responsible for inputting the findings of his or her research into the appropriate slide (i.e., the slide with his/her name on it).

Students should have their slides completed by Tuesday, February 17. They will begin presenting in class on Tuesday. This project will count as two formative grades.

For those who are not familiar with Google Drive and shared documents, all the students in the class can see all of the slides during editing, which means that students who are working on their slides can see others working at the same time. Google records a detailed history of all changes made to the document, including which person made those changes, and allows the owner (me) to revert to any version in the past history should an accident occur. I will heavily monitor all of the changes made to our class presentation during the editing phase.

I have included some notes I shared with the students about the project below.

There is not a “save” button. Google saves the changes as they are made.

·  Students can change fonts, add pictures, etc. to their slides.

·  To change the background color of their slides, students should click on “Background” tab and choose colors.

·  Students should NOT change the “Theme” of the presentation, as this will affect all slides.

·  Editing Google Slides is very limited on iPads.

·  The iPad must have the Google Slides app, and students can only edit the text. Images cannot be added on an iPad; this must be done on a desktop or laptop at home.