1 Graduate-Level Continuing Education Unit, Brandman University

Course Instructor and Author: Donny Wise has been an educator for 20 years, in addition to working for UCLA, Hughes Space and Communication, Monster.com, IDC, and RAND Corporation. He is known for providing very clear, methodological approaches to technology instruction and application, while being inspiring, as well. He is passionate about closing the opportunity and achievement gaps for students by empowering and equipping teachers with relevant, practical, research-based pedagogy and tools.

Course Objective & Learning Goals: This class introduces you to the powerful and free Gmail and Google tools that not only enable you to email others, but also allows you to turn your classroom into an online writing, reading, analyzing, and collaborating environment.

• Lesson 1: Introduction – Getting Started This lesson provides a introductory “tour” of Gmail and the Google Tools. Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, the participant will receive a clear presentation of all the features that will be taught in this course within the context of an inspiring talk on how Gmail and the Google tools fit nicely into the educator’s workflow, lesson plan writing, and teacher-parent interaction. Differences between Google and other tools will be discussed, such as how Google’s tools do not require downloading information to your computer (although the ability to download individual files to your computer is provided). Password creation tips are also provided.
• Lesson 2: Gmail – Key Features Participants learn to send, read, and manage email communication in the Gmail web interface. In particular, inbox management, email archiving, filtering, and searching will be covered.
• Lesson 3: Gmail – Contact Grouping This lesson discusses a feature in Google that will save teacher’s hours of time. This is the feature of being able to create contact groups so that participants can email a group of people at one time. Participants learn how to create a teacher contact group, a student contact group, and a friend and family contact group. In addition, participants learn how to use themes to give your email a personalized look as well as a nice format that can be used for emailing parents and students. Since it is often not advisable that teachers email their personal email address to certain groups of people, participants will be encouraged to use the steps of this lesson within certain contexts and to exercise discernment regarding who they should share their email with. Many of the points in this lesson can be applied to other email servers and accounts, as well.
• Lesson 4: Google Drive – Google Documents Using Google’s online word processing tool is covered in this lesson, including creating a nicely formatted document, co-creating documents, sharing that document with others and printing that document. Participants will be delighted to see that Google Document is better than a discussion forum since it allows people to all “type” on the same document at the same time, and see one another’s work. When students are placed in front of computers, this tool allows them to vote, comment, discuss, and interact with one another and is particularly helpful for both English language learners and standard English language learners.
• Lesson 5: Google Drive – Google Spreadsheets Educators learn how to setup, use, and edit a Google Spreadsheet as well as applications for usage in the classroom. Participants will be delighted to see how easy it is to setup a spreadsheet that either lists all the books they want their students to read, lists the homework that will be assigned for the month, or setup a roster that parents can view to see their children’s behavior.
• Lessons 6: Google Drive – Google Slides Educators learn the how to create a Google presentation that can then be seen, used, and shown to other teachers, students and parents at any time of their choosing. Google Presentation is an application that is also great for addressing the different categories of students in your classroom (English learners, Standard English Learners, Special Education, Culturally diverse, and Gifted students).
• Lesson 7: Google Drive – Communicating, Collaborating, and Lesson Plan Writing Participants will how to effectively communicate by sharing documents with parents and teachers. Google’s Revision History feature is also explained. In this lesson, Donny also shows the student how to create a lesson plan to instruct their students on how to use Google. After this lesson, participants will be emailed a simple set of Google lesson plans that they can use to draw from, in creating their own lesson plans. Upon request, the lessons can be sent also in Spanish for the sake of being take home material for students. The lessons will be different from what the teacher has seen in this course and only focus on the simple steps to email and use the Google tools.