Rootstown Second Graders Use GSuite Education Tools for Digital Workflow

As part of their daily workflow, the second graders are using several tools within Google’s “GSuite” suite of productivity tools including GMail, Google Classroom, Google Forms, and Google Slides. The students are able to access tools in the GSuite using their district-issued student GMail account. One of their primary tools within the GSuite is Google Classroom, a collaborative digital learning space. Google Classroom is a learning platform designed to provide a safe digital learning space where teachers and students can communicate and share content.

The Stream feature within Google Classroom allows the Miss West to post questions and share resources with the students. Miss West often uses the Stream feature to share writing prompts with the students and as an assessment tool to post open-ended questions and prompts that require students to think critically and apply their understanding of specific concepts. Miss West can customize the Stream settings for each assignment so that students may only be able to submit and communicate with the teacher or there is also an option that allows for peer-to-peer communication for collaborative assignments and projects.
Within the Google Classroom platform Miss West is also able to create an assignment and choose how students complete the assignment (e.g., individually, small groups, whole class). The platform also allows her to view students’ work and progress on an assignment and provide feedback to individual students.

This past week the second graders used Google Slides to create animal research reports. Google Slides is a free Google productivity app for creating digital stories, presentations, reports, note cards, etc. Features within the tool allow for slides to include text, images, hyperlinks and video. The Google Slides application offers a wide variety of themes, templates, backgrounds, and fonts that can be used to create very unique customized projects that are automatically saved within Google Drive and can easily be shared and/or downloaded.

Also available in the GSuite, Google Forms is a free tool that offers software and templates for collecting information online. The tool can be used to create surveys, rating scales, tests/quizzes, etc. Teachers are able to customize quizzes and tests to encompass a range of question types including short or long answer, multiple choice, true/false, and yes/no. The platform also offers several color themes for customization and the option to add images. Miss West often uses Google Forms as an assessment or review tool to check students’ understanding of specific concepts.