My Current Set Up

This year I have had a lot of success with my website.  In the past I created a daily PowerPoint for when the kids came in, then posted their homework to another location, and eventually I would just quit making a daily PowerPoint.  This year I decided to streamline a lot of what I was doing by doing everything in Google Docs.  

I have a school loop page that is the main landing spot when anyone wants to go to my website.  This is an easily to use website.  It is simple to add links, and text boxes but is kind of a pain to log into every day.  You can see my website here.  This year I decided early on that everything was going to be in Google Docs.  So when I set up my site I basically made it a bunch of links to Google Docs folders.  This allowed for a couple of things.  First I NEVER got make up work for a student all year.  Anything I passed out in class ended up in my Google Drive.  I saved almost everything as a .pdf and uploaded it.   There were a few plain Google Docs I shared as well and I found this was a great way to keep a running list of links and videos.  

I also posted a direct link to my daily PowerPoint.  This allowed the kids to go in when they were absent and see what we did in class as well as any homework we had.  

I’m looking at how I want to set things up for next year, specifically leaning toward going paperless.  I am planning on doing something similar with School Loop as my jumping off place to google docs, but I also need to figure out how to incorporate students not having a paper copy.  The links to google drive may become useless (other than for parents to see what we are doing, which I think is important and powerful) but as far as student use, I think they will have to go in through their Google Drive.  This then leads me to several questions.

1. If I teach the kids to copy a shared doc to their drive, is there a way for them to drop it into a shared folder so I don’t have hundreds of documents to sort through?

2. What is the purpose of them sharing documents back with me?  Will I go through and grade them?

3. Can I incorporate the use of Quia, or Google forms to collect scores and to assess where students are more efficiently than by grading work they do in Google Docs.