Google Apps for Education: ePortfolio and Formative Assessment Workflow
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Schools and universities can set up free Google Apps
accounts with their own domain name, where they can give all student
and faculty
acces to a variety of tools, including a GMail account, iGoogle portal,
Google Groups for collaboration, and Pages, for creating websites. Each
user can also use their GMail account to activate other Google services,
such as GoogleDocs.
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Students and teachers have email accounts,
with more than 2 GB of storage per account. Gmail
is the web-based or POP-mail account that is also the common ID for other
Google applications. |
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Students have a portal with links to all of their Google
files, applications plus other tools. |

 in GoogleSites
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Students can maintain a reflective journal (blog) of
their learning activities and reflections with feedback through the
commenting
function
that is a part of any blog tool.
(Blogger is not part of GoogleApps, but accessible with Gmail account.)
Since blogspot.com websites are often blocked on school websites. As an alternative to a traditional blog, there is an "Announcements" page type that can be added to a Google Site (below) that could serve as a reflective journal of learning activities. Students can maintain a reflective journal in the form of "Posts" which can later be used as a link to reflection on a specific entry from a web page.
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Students and teachers have space to discuss their work.
(Google Groups is not a part of GoogleApps, but may be accessed with Gmail address.)
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Students create word processing, spreadsheet or presentation
artifacts in GoogleDocs. All GoogleDocs files can be shared for collaboration
with other students in collaborative projects, or with teachers for
feedback.
- Documents are the standard word processing files,
where students can create online, or upload from an existing Microsoft
Word or Open Office word processing file.
- Spreadsheets are the standard spreadsheet applications
which can be imported from an exisrting Microsoft Excel or Open Office
spreadsheet file.
- Presentations are the standard slide show application
which can be imported from an existing Microsoft Powerpoint or Open
Office
presentation file. Other people can be sent the URL for the presentation,
and they can view the presentation in real time.
Here is a short
YouTube video about GoogleDocs that discusses the
process. Here is a brief description of
how to use Google Docs Spreadsheet to facilitate feedback from small
group breakout discussions.
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Students store their video clips online to link into their
Docs or Pages. As of January 2009, Google is restricting access to Google Video to 10 GB per GoogleApps domain... no longer availale for individuals to upload videos.
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Students store their images in online albums. These
could be scanned images or pictures taken with digital cameras.
(Picasa is not a part of GoogleApps, but may be accessed with Gmail address.)
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Students have a tool to keep notes about their navigation
on the WWW.
(Google Notebook is not a part of GoogleApps. It is no longer being developed by Google and does not work with the latest version of Firefox.)
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Teachers can follow student work by subscribing to individual
student blogs, docs, etc. (RSS feeds). Here is a very clever YouTube
video clip that explains RSS and uses the
Google Reader as an example.
(Google Reader is not a part of GoogleApps, but may be accessed with Gmail address.)
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Teachers and other students provide feedback through
the
Share function, which is available in all three GoogleDocs
applications. Comments are available in Documents (not in Presentations). |
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Google Sites is Google's version of a wiki,
released in February 2008. Students could create presentation portfolios
at different benchmarks to showcase
their achievement
of
outcome, goals
or standards.
This tool is a web site creator, where students can embed different
documents created in GoogleDocs or uploaded as another document type,
such as PDF, or embed video (from Google Video or YouTube).The only
data management tool is the GoogleDocs spreadsheet, to aggregate assessment
data. There are lots of interactivity features to this program, such
as
the capability to subscribe to changes in sites or individual pages,
or collaborate on pages in the same way as GoogleDocs. Therefore,
this tool would work for both a presentation portfolio and
for formative or summative assessment.
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