As more faculty move to Google Apps for Education, we want to provide some ideas for how you can use the apps in your classes. We would also like to hear from you. If you have interesting or innovative use cases, please send an email to [email protected]. We would be happy to feature your stories in an upcoming newsletter.

Create
You can use Google Drive to quickly create and share lecture notes and presentations. Gather the information you need, create your doc or presentation in Drive, and then click “share” and copy the link to send to your students.

Collaborate
In addition to creating your own documents and presentations, you can also use Drive to start projects and then invite students to collaborate. Students can also use Drive to create assignments and then share them with you in order to get feedback. Drive allows for real-time chat, multiple comment conversations, and maintains a full history of revisions. You can work with students to develop a paper or presentation and track their progress as you provide feedback.

Collect
Need to gather information from students at the start of the semester? Looking for an easy way to create appointments during your office hours? Try Google Forms. You can create forms from within Drive in order to gather feedback quickly and track the results in a spreadsheet.

Empower
Your students can use Google Sites to compile portfolios or gather resources for a group project. Sites allows for embedding of documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and more, making it the perfect place to create and display projects while gaining valuable technology and communication experience.

To find out more about each of the apps and what they can do, visit the Google Apps project site and click on the links under the “Using Google Apps” section.