So now that you'e collected all those parent e-mail addresses, you might be thinking that having a contact group to use for e-mail or to use to share documents might be a nice thing. Luckily, creating a group is pretty easy to do. Here is a screencast with directions on how to do it. You'll find Contacts in the drop down menu under Mail. Just click the arrow to find Contacts to get started:
A really nice thing about Gmail contact groups is they also work when you want to share a Google Drive file.
For those of you who prefer to read directions, here is a step-by-step post by Alice Keeler.
Once you have a contact list set up, it is super easy to edit it during the year should your parent information change.
This Week's EduWin
This week, I'd like to recognize Carly Sturm. Carly is new to the Union School District. She is a fourth grade teacher at Lietz and is piloting the flexible furniture in her classroom. Lucky for Carly, being assigned a room with flexible furniture had the up-side of coming with a Chromebook cart. Carly jumped right in and had her students learning Google Drive.
"The students learned how to use Google docs to word process and type a paragraph based on a community building activity we did the first week of school. (CCSS 5.W.6) I presented the lesson yesterday as students followed along on their Chrome Books. Today, I had "experts" come to the front of the room to explain basic word processing functions that we learned yesterday like how to center text, how to double space, etc." The students were excited to be "expert teachers" and the whole class was energized by the activity.
Giving students the spotlight is always motivating. Thanks, Carly, for sharing your EduWin.
If you or one of your colleagues are doing something in your class that uses edtech tools, please let me know. I'd love to share it with other teachers.
Have a great weekend.
