Today I am working on preparing my class blog as a hub for all the activities I intend for my students to participate in for the upcoming school year. For example, I want to have a running list of vocabulary words that my students can access at any time and search for their own definitions before I begin a lesson. I could certainly post each day's vocabulary words the old fashioned way, by writing them on a dry erase board or taping words to a wall, but the problem I see is that if a student is absent one or more days, I need an easy way for them to find the words they need to get caught up without cluttering my walls and boards with days and days of vocabulary words. So why not use a Google Document?
I can use Google Documents several different ways. My vocabulary word pages can only be edited by me, but viewed by anyone. I've made it easy for my students to find their vocabulary words by creating a link to that specific Google Document (a spreadsheet, in this case) straight from my class blog. Other documents, such as my classroom's "Jobs in Science" page, will be a class collaborative project, where students can not only access, but can also edit the page as they learn about and think of jobs related to the material we cover in class.
Ideally, I would change the Sharing settings on each document to be only accessible and editable by my students only. I have the option of setting up each document this way, but in order to do so, I must have the email addresses of each of my students. I have discovered over the past year that due to the use of texting, chatting tools and social networking sites, few of my students actually have email accounts. The easiest way for me to give them access to my class documents is just to open up the editing rights to "everyone," which I suppose gives perfect strangers the ability to participate in my class projects, but this is probably not a likely situation and if it were to happen, isn't that the point of a collaborative project anyway?
