Tool 4

For the past two years our team has shared documents for a variety of reasons including team planning documents, road mapping, posting models for student writing, and the general sharing of ideas. Also for the past two years, I have made numerous attempts to engage other teams and departments in the use of the platform for team building and as exemplars of the power of sharing and collaboration. When those attempts have been met with silence, I have offered numerous opportunities for training on setting up a mechanism for use within a faculty for administrative use, within a team, and most importantly how to facilitate its use with students. Due a pervasive lack of interest I have focused those efforts exclusively with my students. I now operate in a paperless classroom. Students routinely not only share documents and presentations with their peers for comment and/or editing, but work collaboratively on writing and presentation projects. We only print final draft documents for placement in the student portfolios. Beginning in 2012, each student will use Google Sites as an electronic portfolio.