Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Have You Looked At Google Add Ons?



Google Apps for Education is proving to be a fantastic collaboration, cloud-based tool for the classroom. While there are many pros to using the suite of tools that comes with your Google Apps account, Google doesn't do everything that other word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet programs can do.  To try to alleviate some of those drawbacks, Google has what are known as scripts that will run in a program and perform some kind of function.  Recently, Google changed the name of their script gallery to Add Ons.  

Here are a few of the really great Add Ons that may help teachers and students perform a task that is otherwise not available in Google.

Google Docs

1.  Kaizena - this Add On allows the teacher to create voice comments in a Google Doc.  Instead of typing out all the comments you want to make after a student turns in a paper, create voice comments that students can listen to.  

2. gMath - this Add On allows you to create awesome math equations in the proper format in a Google Doc.  The equations are inserted in the document as a picture, allowing them to be moved and copied and pasted into other applications.

3.  GFormIt - this is a great tool for those teachers who already have quizzes created in a word document.  Using Google Docs, a teacher can create questions and answers, and then use the Add On GFormIt to turn all the questions and answers into a form that students can type into.  It even creates the spreadsheet for responses, and inserts the answers into the first row, if a teacher wants to use Flubaroo or SuperQuiz to grade the answers.  *Drawback - the Add On only creates text questions, not multiple choice quizzes.


Google Sheets

1.  Doctopus/Goobric - If you are NOT using Google Classroom (and why aren't you, it's a fantastic organziational tool for teachers and students!) you may want to look into Doctopus and Goobric.  Doctopus takes your class roster and allows you to create a folder for each of your students in your class, then send documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. to the folders on each students drive. You can collect documents through Doctopus also, and make a list of students and the links to their documents in a spreadsheet.  Goobric works through Doctopus to insert rubrics that you create into student work, allowing your to grade assignments and pass them back through Doctopus.  It sounds complicated, but the Add On gives you step by step directions.

2.  Flubaroo - When teachers create a form to use as an assessment, a spreadsheet is created when responses are submitted in the form.  Flubaroo is a tool that will automatically grade the responses in the spreadsheet, giving the teacher immediate results in a color coded list of right and wrong answers in a new tab.  It's a time-saver and an easy to use tool.

3.  Super Quiz - Flubaroo on Steroids!  This form as assessment tool not only grades the submitted responses in a spreadsheet, it also creates several other tabs that analyze the graded responses, allows the teacher to set up responses to give as feedback to students, creates a document for each student with their grade, the teacher feedback, and extension questions, AND emails the documents to each student who submitted a response.  A fantastic tool for grading and providing feedback to students.

Google Presentations does not have an Add On menu option at this time.

While these are merely a few of the Add Ons available with your Google Apps for Education applications, already you can see what great functionality they can provide.  I urge you to check out these, and other, Google Add Ons. Simply open Google Docs or Google Sheets, find the menu options Add Ons, and click Get Add Ons.  I hope you do!

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