The Teacher Challenge for Week 3, Create a Collaborative Student Project, is packed with resources, ideas and instructions. This is intentional and necessary because the Teacher Challenge is designed to be useful for teachers across all grade levels and content areas. It also has to work for educators with various levels of ThingLink expertise.

For this reason, I believe it’s a good idea to unpack this challenge a bit and take a closer look at the use Google Docs within Create a Collaborative Student Project to help participants take advantage of using Google Docs to power a ThingLink.

A Closer Look at Google Docs

One of the primary goals of the challenge for week 3 is to help participants experience the power and usefulness of combining ThingLink with Google Docs. Educators can use a Google Doc to collect information, automate tasks and make the  workflow progress smoothly throughout a student driven learning experience. ThingLink’s media rich platform displays published Google Docs right on top of any image. Better yet,  those Google Docs are live and interactive. This a truly great combination of tools for the classroom.

As you Create a Collaborative Student Project for week #3 of the Teacher Challenge, you are bound to skim through the directions again. This time, pay close attention to the Google Docs and how they are used.

Ways to Put Google Docs to Work 

• Collect information for record-keeping and organize it all in one place.
• Collect student feedback to personalize learning.
• Informally assess students and use the results to guide instruction.
• Collect assignments with a link for sharing in one place, sort it to assess growth and encourage student self-reflection
• Pre-assess knowledge and skills for use in providing resources and instructional grouping.
• Inform and teach by including instructional videos and resources 
• + more!

Unpacking Forms, Sheets and Add-ons

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Make the Map Interactive 

Every ThingLink starts with an image. The base image for the Digital Self Map was created following the steps above. Next, a snapshot of the map was taken and uploaded to ThingLink. Tags with links to each participant’s Digital Self are being add the map. As more participants Design Your Digital Self, a new map can be created in less than 5 minutes. Best of all, the Replace Image feature below each image allows the new map to replace the old map with the existing tags in tact! Stay tuned, this is going to be an amazing map!

Explore Google Sheets Add-ons