Friday, August 19, 2016

Using Google Classroom's Question Feature by Sarah Scholz

One of the features of Google Classroom I like the most for in-class activities is the question feature. Although I have used the question feature for short answer quizzes, I prefer to use it to display information that students generate, either in groups or on their own.

For example, I wanted my E1H students to practice choosing relevant quotations and explaining these quotations in order to support claims from Romeo and Juliet. I created a game that involved 5 rounds and required students to work in groups to pick a quotation that they would type into the question feature in Google Classroom. Because the computers were merely a tool to gather and display their work, I only allowed one computer per group of 3-4 students.

To create a question, click on the plus sign in the lower right hand corner of one of your Google Classroom pages and navigate up to Question. For this activity, I put the round number and claim on the question line and turned off the ability for students to reply or edit posts.


Because I didn't want to allow students to start a round before the class was ready, I saved each round as a draft and released them as we advanced through the game. I gave students a specific amount of time to locate and type their quotation into Google Classroom.

Once it was posted and student groups had answered, it looked like this:


There are only 6 done because only one student from each group completed the question for his/her group. After the allotted time, I put the answers up on the projector. It looked like this: 

I then had student groups read their quotations and offer their explanation to connect the quotation to the claim. As they were presenting to the class, I took notes so that I could highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their explanations to the class. After I shared some of these notes with the class, I awarded a winner of that round. In the end, the overall winning group received the prize of choosing their debate topic first.

Google Question is a great way to quickly and uniformly get student-generated text up on your projector!




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