In this paper, I will share some ideas for using Google applications both to digitize paper-based activities and to create new digital activities that help students share their ideas within groups and across the class. I also share some standard functions and features of Google Apps with which the teacher can track students’ progress and collect data that can be used for follow-up projects. The two sets of examples explored here are supplemental activities for Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), an approach that uses images to help students learn critical thinking skills, and a paper-based Classmate Interview (McGuire et al., 2023). I hope I’ve included enough to get the reader started and I hope these ideas inspire creative new cooperative applications.
Example 1: Google Apps
Below is an example of three steps in a lesson using Google Apps to supplement a VTS activity. Briefly, in VTS, students view images that are curated to be at a level at which they can answer three questions: “What’s going on in this picture?”, “What do you see that makes you say that?”, and “What more can we find?” Unlike a traditional teacher-facilitated whole-class VTS activity, I immediately have students answer the VTS questions individually and in groups.
Step 1: Google Sheets VTS Vocabulary/Translation
As shown in Figure 1, students input the keywords that reflect their answers to the three VTS questions into the cells in column B, and the words are translated into Japanese in the matching cells in column C. For example, the formula in C5, =googletranslate(B5,”en”, “ja”, is translating the word “bed” in B5 into Japanese. Students get immediate feedback on the accuracy of their words and also get a sense in English and Japanese of other students’ ideas.
Figure 2 shows the pivot table that displays the number of words each student has inputted, sorted by the ID number students inputted in Column A (see Figure 1). The steps for creating a pivot table are: (1) click on Insert in the menu bar, (2) choose pivot table, new sheet (to start a new sheet in the current one); (3) choose Rows to group the list of student ideas, and (4) choose Values and Count to get a count by ID number. For future activities, teachers can simply copy a previously used Google Sheets workbook, replace the image, and reset the answers.
Step 2: Google Forms “I think___ because___”
As an easy way to get students to share, I have them input their three required answers and two optional bonus answers to the first two VTS questions (“What’s going on in the picture?” and “What do you see that makes you say that?”) and respective keywords, into a Google Form. I provide the format “I think _______ because________.” for their answers to make the task easier for my lower-level students. The Google Sheet as outputted from a Google Form (see Figure 3) offers a small sample of the range of ideas and vocabulary that even my lower-level students produce using VTS. Having students input information, such as class or ID, makes sorting the output by classes and group making assessment easier. Students then share their answers as in Steps 3a and 3b below.
Step 3a: Google Slides Variation 1: Keyword Sticky Notes
In this Google Slides activity, students in each group share their work on their own page. Figure 4 shows a table with different-colored rows in which students input their IDs and full names. Students make copies of the sticky notes matching their color and input five of their 10 keywords. Students can look at other groups’ slides and the teacher can display all the slides on the overhead (In Google Slides, click View, then Gridview.) Google also offers versioning (Click File, then Version history.) by which the teacher can track student participation. The reader may see many ways this activity might also be used for brainstorming.
Students then group sticky notes with similar ideas together, as shown in Figure 5. This acts as a sort of mini word-cloud by which they can see their own and other groups’ ideas.
Step 3b: Google Slides Variation 2: Student Comments
A variation of the Google Slides activity for higher-level students is to have them each type in their “I think___ because ___” responses to the VTS questions. Figure 6 shows a Google Slide using VTS images from The New York Times' website (search for “NYT VTS”). Comments from students around the world can also be viewed on the website. Lower-level students might be asked to input just one “I think___ because ___” idea along with their sticky notes.
Example 2: The English Gym Google Sheets Classmate Interview
Figure 7 shows my digital adaptation of the Classmate Interview (McGuire et al., 2023) activity. In Google Sheets, students use a dropdown menu to choose which five of the 10 questions from the unit they’d like to ask and then fill in the interviewed students’ names and answers. Teachers using Google Classroom can easily view students’ progress. Alternatively, share a clickable link with students by replacing the word /edit at the end of the link in the browser to /copy, which when clicked will create a new copy on their Google Drive. Students can then email their finished pages to the teacher or upload them to a class folder.
Figure 8 shows a sample dropdown menu for the 10 questions. Highlight the cells into which you want to add the dropdowns (e.g., A4 to A13) and then click Insert and choose Dropdown. For Criteria, choose Dropdown (from a range) and input the range of cells from which the dropdown options will come (e.g., =$A$3:$A$13), that is, the 10 sentences for students to choose from. Putting “10 Questions” at the top makes it show as the first option. Before sharing this, I hide Column A and Rows 9 to 13 from the students.
Figure 9 shows a conditional formatting feature I added later to change the color of the cells as students input data. I kept the command simple: if the text changes from the word “Answer,” the color of the cell will change. I chose the color using the color beaker under Custom to change from gray (as in Column H in Figure 7) to blue. After I added this feature, the rate of completion seemed to increase significantly.
Conclusion
Google Apps provide useful ways for students to collaborate and learn from each other, and the data enable teachers not only to track students’ progress but to share students’ ideas with the entire class. The data can easily be used in third-party apps such as Quizlet for vocabulary, AnswerGarden for word clouds, or even in Google Forms to check what students learned through their activities. The formats for the Classmate Interview and the Google Slide activity can be adapted to any activity in which students interview or interact with others. While there is a bit of a learning curve in getting started, the results are well worth the initial effort.
References
McGuire, S., Honeycut, J., Huang, C., Keith, S. J., & Shiraishi, C. (2023). A collaborative university-wide communication English curriculum development project. Bulletin of Nagoya University of Arts, 44, 101-119. https://www.nua.ac.jp/research/files/pdf/70a398e6baa3a6f0c591244cc9af206...
