How to use Google Docs for Assignment Submission and Organization

Rhiannon Goad — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 20:03:17 +0000

Author:

Rhiannon Goad

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Google Doodle, First Day of School 2011 - Estonia, Poland, Russia

Despite my best efforts, I’m a sloppy person with an extremely limited capacity for not losing things. Fortunately, Google Docs provides an easy way for me to organize students’ assignments. Below I outline how to use Google Docs for assignment submission.

Directions for you

1. Using Google Drive, create a Google form for assignment submission. You can set up one submission form for the entire semester or send out a different form for each assignment. Personally, I use the same survey for all assignments because… laziness. You do you.

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2. From here you can paste an embedded link to your fancy pants webpage or send via email.

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Responses generate in a spreadsheet. Here, that spreadsheet is named “assignments for fall 2013.”

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3. Open your spreadsheet and marvel at the beauty of it all. To view a student’s work, click on the link. You could even create a column to track grading. Guys, spreadsheets: truly truly truly outrageous.

Directions for them

1. Students must use a Gmail or UT email account. Since the university requires all students to have an official UT email account, this should not be a problem. Using a Google account, students must create or upload their assignments using Google drive.

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2 She’ll need to get the link to put into the Google Form. To do this, she’ll need to click File>Share.

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3. She’ll then make sure you can open the assignment by changing the access.

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4. If you want to comment directly on your student’s Google Doc, have her select Can edit or Can comment.

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5. She then copies the link for the document.

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6. Finally, she pastes the link into the submission form, fills out the other fields, and hits submit. Ta-da!

Teaching and Writing

Delacroix — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:00:14 +0000

Author:

Julia Delacroix

Image Credit:

Michelle Tribe

So I went on the job market this year, and one of the questions that kept coming up was how I saw my teaching and my scholarship fitting together. I’m working on a dissertation on early American poetry and have taught poetry classes, so some of the connections are pretty obvious. But this semester I’m teaching 306, and while my students would certainly freak out (by which I mean feign sleep in spectacular and dramatic attitudes of disinterest) if I busted out some Puritan funeral elegies, I have been thinking a lot about the parallels between the writing they do, which has them emailing me questions about paper 2 at one in the morning, and the writing I do, which has me up reading emails at one a.m. and avoiding my dissertation.

Here are two things I’ve noticed this semester:

1. My students really, really, really want me to give them a template for how to organize their papers. It frustrates them that I seem to know how each of their papers should be organized, but I won’t tell.

2. I really, really, really want someone to give me a template for how to organize my dissertation chapters. Each chapter I’ve written has been torn apart and restructured at least twice. It’s tedious work, and frustrating, and it pushes me to animal metaphors: It’s like trying to stuff a cat into a cat-sized wetsuit. Or I feel like a small dog trying to grab a beach ball in its teeth. I don’t know why the metaphors are animal, but they always are.

As a result of our parallel experiences (and I’m embarrassed to admit this, but here goes): I have an empathy for my students than I’ve ever had before. I’ve always liked them, so I’ve always felt sympathy for their frustration, but I’ve never really been able to identify with it. I like writing; it’s why I study writing for a job. Sure, I saw writing as a challenge, but a pleasant one. Maybe because I always knew I could figure out what I needed to say if I just kept at the paper I was working on.

Somehow that didn’t seem to apply for the dissertation; not for me at least. There was a fear of failure, that maybe this couldn’t be done, that maybe these ideas wouldn’t pan out. That was new to me, and that made everything much more difficult. I recognized the feeling, though; it was one my students had described to me many times over conferences, as we talked our way through their work together. Unfortunately for my students (but, you know, good in the long run) my newfound empathy was accompanied by a realization: whenever I couldn’t organize a chapter, or a section, or even a sentence, it meant I didn’t have it. The ideas were there, but they were blurrier than I’d realized or hoped, and it was in the thinking through of the organization that the ideas themselves crystallized. I couldn’t figure out what I needed to say until I started to say it.

So that’s why I feel confident saying no, I won’t give you a template for your paper. No, not even for the introduction. But yes, you can get this done if you just keep working at it. And when we meet to talk your paper through and I tell you I know where you’re coming from? I really do.

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How to use Google Docs for Assignment Submission and Organization

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Teaching and Writing

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