Critical analysis of a planned teaching activity: Google Drive workshop

Dr Nicola Pallitt, LecturerCentre for Innovation in Teaching & Learning

University of Cape Town

• 1 hour workshop attended by 4 LTHE students & 1 peer-observer

Teaching context

• Email sent to participants beforehand• BYOD• Download Google Chrome • Read 1-pager ’15 Reasons Why Google Docs

Rocks’• Email gmail address to facilitator before the

workshop• Workshop brief (what to expect) & details (4-

5pm Tuesday 29 April 2014 in PD Hahn 7.63)

• Facilitator and participants worked on a doc in a shared folder

• Workshop activities outlined in the doc

Workshop organisation

Workshop in brief: I will give a short explanation of cloud storage and then introduce you to Google Docs by scaffolding how you can use it in various ways. I will be using the LTHE course as a basis, as it is a learning community we are currently part of and I will apply the activities we will be doing using Google Docs in the workshop to this. 

(extract from email to LTHE

Google Drive workshop

participants)

intended learning outcomes involved experiential learning activities

• Student learning outcomes (workshop participant focus, the ends):• By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to use

various features within Google Documents to collaborate with colleagues/students.

• Students will develop an awareness of the affordances of online collaboration.

• What ‘students’ will do (the means):• Collaborate with classmates on a shared Google Document by

testing out various features (comment, chat, add-ons)

• Workshop aims (facilitator focus – what I want to achieve):• Offer a hands-on introduction to using Google Documents as a

collaborative tool. • Discuss strategies and guidelines for using Google Drive with

colleagues and students.• Scaffold use in a meaningful context to allow participants to

see relevance and uses for their own contexts

Planned learning outcomes

• Experiential/personal relevance paradigm (Toohey, 1999), experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)

• Inspired by flipped classroom

Theoretical framework

• Highly effective • Partly due to smaller number of

participants• Participants and facilitator were

familiar with one another prior to workshop (LTHE course)

• Peer-observer and participants all had positive feedback

Reflection on effectiveness of workshop

Some challenges = moving between demonstration and hands-on application & collaboration, responding to questions, improvising

Highlights from peer-observer:

Your explanations are very clear and SIMPLE (I personally find technology to be quite complicated, but you made me think and feel otherwise). UNDERSTANDING

 You lecture at a good pace, with step-by-step instructions to the activities. UNDERSTANDING

 You are very patient, and offer each student an opportunity to ask questions.

UNDERSTANDING 

The activity was an en excellent way of getting students to practice their understanding of what was learnt. APPLYING

 The activity related to something (LTHE) that was relevant to everyone. REMEMBERING

 Something I liked was that you asked each student about their own experience, and offered

recommendations as to what has worked best in your experience. ANALYSING   

It was really nice to see students engaging and applying what they have learnt- immediately. APPLYING / CREATING

  The evaluation at the end did not take much time and you were able to get an instant response.

EVALUATING

• Workshop evaluation forms completed by participants indicate alignment with learning outcomes

• Participants were also shown how the Google form was created, published and how to access respondents’ data

• One participant emailed a few days later saying that she was able to create an evaluation using a Google form for her own teaching activity within minutes and was very pleased

• ‘when there are moments of silence during the lecture, to maybe talk through what it is you are doing’ (peer-observer feedback)

• F2F silence, not = absence of communication – facilitation via online document

• Classmates also students – ‘real’ students/ lecturers may have been more critical?

• Some activities will need to be redesigned for a diverse group who are not familiar with one another (i.e. texts participants engage with and collaborate around)

• Max. 10 participants can collaborate in a Google Doc – larger workshops will require 2 docs = challenge for facilitator using experiential approach

Suggestions for improvement / things to consider for next time

Thank you