Just learned about the new Google Docs Research tool via @moniamaro59

I’m collaborating with 6th grade Social Studies teacher Monica Amaro (@moniamaro59)  on an iMovie project where here students will research topics about the culture, religion, architecture, medicine, food, language, politics, etc. of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. They’ll be gathering their research in Google Docs. Monica just showed me something that one of her 6th graders showed her: Google Docs now has a Research Tool that allows embeds a right-side column for you to google websites, images, quotes, and scholarly writings about the topic.

The most satisfying feature for us so far is that when you located images, they are embedded into your Google Doc and their location is cited in a footnote at the bottom of the page. There is no excuse for forgetting to cite your sources anymore!

I found the article below about using the embedded Google Doc’s new Research Tool here:

How to use Google Docs’ new Research tool: New feature automates research process, making it easier for everyone

By Leslie Meredith

Whether you’re a student facing final papers or a parent helping kids with research assignments, Google has just made the process a lot easier with a new tool that automates the research process.

Simply called “Research,” the tool lets you conduct searches for terms related to your document or search for just quotes or images from a panel that appears to the right of your document.

Searching for a location automatically brings up a Google map that you can insert as is or edit by zooming in or out. Photos can be filtered to include only those that are licensed for free use — a good idea to avoid copyright problems.

For Web page results, hover over the link to see a preview of the page. Like what you see? Click “insert link” to add it to your text.

Further, the Research tool lets you insert a citation, automatically formatted, into your document.

Here’s how it works: After you’ve inserted a link, click “cite.” Google will add a superscript footnote number to the link in your text and generate a properly constructed footnote at the bottom of the page.

There are three ways to activate the research panel. Within an open document, go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the page and select “Research.” You can also use a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+R on a PC and Command+Option+R on a Mac. To jumpstart the process, you can right-click on a word or highlight a phrase to launch a search for your term.

Copyright 2012 TechNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

Meeting with @donbuckley to schedule afterschool professional development workshops at @The_School

Don Buckley (my boss and the Director of Innovation at The School at Columbia University) and I met this morning and created a schedule to formalize our informal in-house professional development sessions. Here’s the note that we composed this morning that Don just sent out to faculty:

Based on the success of the iPad App shares and our Tweetup, we’d like to host more meetups about new media literacies. The following dates and times have been set aside for these conversations. Please feel free to suggest other topics too! All meetups will happen in the Library.

Feb 29th (Wed) … Presentations (Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, GooglePres)
March 6th (Tues) … The Gallery and The Tube
March 28th (Wed) … Twitter/PLN
April 2nd (Mon) … Infographics
April 11th (Wed) … 3D printing (other location needed)
April 26th (Thurs) … iPad App share
May 7th (Mon) … Google Forms and more Infographics with data
May 16th (Wed) … TBD
May 24th (Thurs) … TBD

don

6th graders added Art posts to their digital portfolio created with Google Sites

Yesterday, I was in Yoshiko Maruiwa‘s art classes to help 6th graders add three posts to their personal digital portfolio (created in Google Sites). Yoshiko takes photos of all their finished work and creates albums on The Gallery. (The Gallery is our internal photo server powered by Drupal.) Kids include an image of their work along with an artist statement that explains their process, idea, challenges, successes, curricular connections, and anything else they want to include to curate their work. For today’s class, the students made a post for their Art Self Portrait, Art Tessellation, and Art Circle Design.

To organize all the posts from their 6th grade year, kids created an Announcements page named 2011-2012. As each post is written, it snaps into place in the sidebar index and is arranged alphabetically. Hence, I have them title their posts starting with the subject. I like this better than creating a new page/section for each subject. This way there are less clicks to get to examples of their work, and there is no danger of having pages without any projects on them.

During the course of our discussion, we talked about:

1. Their invisible audience – while access to the kids’ digital portfolios is limited to users on our school’s GoogleApps domain, everyone in the community has an account. At any moment, their work could be viewed by students, teachers, administrators, parents, and anyone with access to a username/password. This should influence what they write (informative without being super personal) and how they write (grammatically correct).
2. Appropriate commenting – write a comment that is specific and/or can initiate a discussion. Something like, “I liked your use of color” or “I see you painted a guitar. Do you play any other instruments?”
3. Inserting an image by linking to the URL of the image online rather than taking a screen snapshot or dragging a copy of the image to the desktop. By using the URL, students can simply point to something else online. The alternative is to copy/take/steal a version of it which is tantamount to theft (depending on how the work is licensed).

5th graders are updating their #GoogleSites digital portfolios in preparation for parent conferences

All students in grades 3-8 at The School at Columbia University are keeping a personal digital portfolio created with GoogleSites. I wrote an earlier post here about how we are using a really simple Announcements template to organize their New Posts.

Today, I worked with 5th graders in Dena Rothstein‘s class to gather some of their work and archive it digitally. We talked about labeling their posts with the subject so that they align alphabetically and clustered by subject in the sidebar. Kids wrote about their Spanish calacas, Spanish altars, Math locker problem, Math Handshake problem, and more.

Kids either took pictures using PhotoBooth on their MacBooks or with an external point-and-shoot camera. Dena provided them with a short list of writing prompts: Describe the process, Describe any challenges, Describe what you makes you proud…