Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Embedding a Google Document in a Google Site Page

Google Document sharing can get very messy if you have a lot of students. This semester, I have 45 students enrolled in the two sections of “Technology 4 Teachers” which I’m teaching at the University of Central Oklahoma. One week when I was absent, my substitute instructor discussed the “sample unit plan” assignment with students and told them all to share their Google Documents directly with me, using my personal email address. While this method DOES work for document sharing, for class assignment purposes this may NOT be a “best practice” (depending on how you, as an instructor, what to provide feedback to students) and can easily get messy if you have a LOT of students.

Example of messy Google Doc sharing

There are several reasons I do not like having students directly share Google Docs with me using my Google Account. First of all, I have not and did not want to share my direct Gmail address with my students. I have specific instructions in my course syllabus and course outline that students are ONLY to communicate electronically with me via our BlackBoard/WebCT messaging system. This is critical to avoid information overload and confusion with email messages. I have worked with NUMEROUS online instructors over the years, as well as face-to-face instructors / professors, who became overwhelmed with the quantity of email they received from students. This is a training issue, for both instructors and students. Personally, I think the “best practice” is to train and condition students to NEVER contact you as an instructor through your “regular” email. In an emergency students are welcome to call me directly on the phone, but for all “normal” communications our learning management system messaging service works well and is preferred. That way I know which course and section a student is in when they ask a question, and I can look up a grade or other information as required by their question. When you teach multiple sections of a course in the same term, students often don’t provide their section information in every email they send to you, and this can be confusing to the instructor. If students message you through your learning management system, however, it’s immediately clear which course/section they’re in since messages are organized by course section.

I also maintain a “Frequently Asked Questions” blog for my class, where students can (and are encouraged) to submit questions and view answers to other questions. I really do want students to ask LOTS of questions during the course of our semester together, but for my own information processing and survival purposes (and to provide timely responses to students) it’s critical students understand “the right ways” to ask questions electronically.

The following four minute screencast explains how students can embed a Google Document on a page of their Google Site, and then turn in the URL / direct link to that page when they “submit” an assignment to me via BlackBoard/WebCT.

I’m finding the method of setting up quizzes in Blackboard/WebCT in which students submit a direct link to a post on their reflection blog (created with Blogger) or in this case a specific page of their Google Site is working very well. It’s efficient for me as their instructor evaluating their work, and it’s helped them develop their skills of not only blogging and creating wiki pages, but also sharing direct links to specific websites. These are all great skills to cultivate as 21st century teachers!

The biggest drawback of the method I’m describing above is I do NOT have access to edit and directly add comments to students’ documents. There IS a lot of benefit in doing that, but if we were using that collaboration option it would be vital for students to use a standard file naming syntax / protocol so I could readily identify their name, section, and the assignment title. If students do NOT directly share a Google Doc with me via my email address, they also have to be sure and PUBLISH their document for the world to see, using the SHARING options in the upper right corner of the Google Doc. If they don’t do this, the document isn’t visible to me.

What have your experiences been when students share Google Docs with you for evaluation purposes? Do you have any good tips or suggestions to share which might help others?

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4 responses to “Embedding a Google Document in a Google Site Page”

  1. Jeff Yearout Avatar

    My principal has asked me to investigate how to use the sharing in Google Docs (we have Google Apps For Education here in my district) as a means of submitting lesson plans, and this particular overload of sharing issue was one I saw right away. I’m still working on what will be the easiest to do for teachers and most manageable for administrators on this task. If I arrive at any good conclusions, I’ll come back and share.

  2. Kit Hard Avatar

    I agree that having student’s share Google Docs by e-mail invitation is not ideal. Here’s the solution we are currently using at our school.

    Another way to get the URL for a Google Doc is to use the “get link to share” feature under the share tab. We have students check the “Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)” and then copy the URL provided. Students then submit the URL to our CMS (Moodle). There is also an additional option to allow editing rights. Here’s a link to my tutorial for a more detailed explanation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUiBMoGkD_Y

  3. Wesley Fryer Avatar

    Sound good, Jeff.

    That’s a great tip, Kit. I definitely can see how that is beneficial, because it avoids using the teacher’s Google account for the sharing. If you choose to edit a Google Doc set to allow “anyone to share” I think it will then appear in your own list of Google Docs, however… I think that may be the case even if you just “view” it. So file naming protocols are probably still important there. I may use your suggestion when I teach this course next term.

  4. Rex Seigler Avatar
    Rex Seigler

    I had a separate Gmail account created for each class section. I had all students of each section share and with that account. This let me know which class period or section they were assigned. I also tried (did not always work) to have the students use a standard naming system for their email accounts, based on their student index numbers (which isn’t linked to a social security number or anything else traceable outside the school district).
    Thanks to Google’s threading feature all emails, and or documents would be grouped by the sender / author.