The Discussion Leader Project

For a few years now, I’ve run a project in my Educational Psychology course that I call the Discussion Leader Project. In a face-to-face course, that project has involved students leading a portion of a class session in a peer teaching style of learning – teams of students become relative experts in their chosen topic, and they help their peers to develop those same skills. Alongside my own activities, discussions, and lectures, these Discussion Leader sessions have been helpful for the leaders themselves, their peers, and even me – it’s useful to see these same topics in a different light.

The transition of the face-to-face Ed Psych course to an asynchronous online environment presented a challenge, however: how to maintain the collaborative, peer teaching atmosphere of the project when students are inherently more separated from each other? I struggled with this issue for quite some time before landing on an option that I’ve now come to enjoy: Google Sites as a tool for collaborative, student-led design of a learning resource. I first implemented this version of the Discussion Leader project in the Fall 2020 semester, and you can see how this student-led design worked out on the public wiki site here (a copy, with student information removed).

Google Sites for Learning

Google Sites (https://sites.google.com/) allows anyone with a Google account (it doesn’t have to be a Gmail account!) to create websites for free from within the Google Drive framework. If you’re familiar with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other Drive tools, Google Sites has a relatively easy learning curve. Perhaps most importantly for those of us shifting more and more courses online (but didn’t grow up coding), Sites requires no coding or programming experience whatsoever. Using plain language explanations and labels, website creators can drag and drop pre-made section designs or create their own designs with clickable buttons, images, customizable text boxes, and more. Perhaps best of all, because Sites is tied to the larger Google Suite, the system allows you to embed items from across your (and your collaborators’) Google Drive storage and beyond – including Docs, Sheets, YouTube videos and more. If you’ve made a file editable by anyone, viewers of the website can even edit from within your site!

For my use of Google Sites in my Ed Psych Discussion Leader project, students signed up for a topic and were then granted access to the editable version of the website via their Google Account (see the Caveats below!). As part of the introduction to the project (and to Google Sites), I also provided two sample pages on the newly-dubbed Ed Psych Wiki for students to use as a rough reference point for some of the capabilities of the system. In the image above, you can see an example of how I organized the topic pages based on the exam each topic was included on.

Students took to designing their webpages almost immediately, and I was pleased with the variety of layouts and approaches that teams had in developing their sites. In Zoom conversations and other interactions with students, teams displayed clear designerly thinking, with joint goals of usability and usefulness for their peers. On their peer review form, for instance, one student discussed how their team started from the point of asking what they wish they had learned first in exploring the topic, and designed the page around the core premise of what would be helpful to have while learning. Below, I include a sample of a student-built section of our Methods & Media topic, in which we discuss issues of how teaching method and instructional medium/format relate.

Caveats

I have been very happy with how Google Sites has enabled my students to engage in collaborative, designerly learning through web-based peer teaching. However, there are a few things to keep in mind before using Google Sites in your course:

• External Tool – while Google Sites is surprisingly easy and intuitive to learn and use, it is an external tool, which carries inherent risk and difficulty. Students may be hesitant to have to go outside of the college-branded/supported tools (Talon, MyHub, etc.).
  • One potential way to address this is to embed pages directly in Talon – just add the link to Course Content and *don’t* set it as an external resource!
• Google Account – although it’s possible to *view* a Google Site either way (assuming you’ve set the site to be public!), both you and your students will need Google-linked accounts in order to access the editable version of the website. In other words, at least one member of each group will need a Google account, and most likely everyone will.
  • That said, keep in mind that it does not need to be a Gmail account – any account linked to Google Drive will work.
• Learning Curve – Google has actually done a great job with smoothing out the learning curve, but it does still take time. Knowing how to combine items, build sections, and correctly set permissions will require a little behind-the-scenes work.
  • To help students with this, I published sample pages featuring some of the things you could do in the system!

My Conclusions

Overall, I have been very pleased with how Google Sites works, and it’s been a great addition to my online and hybrid coursework. It provides a fantastic tool for collaborative work that has a minimal learning curve and allows for seamless Google Drive and YouTube integration. During my first semester using Sites for the Discussion Leader project, more than 80% of my students indicated that they used the site to prepare for exams, and I even had a student volunteer to create an additional page (for a topic without anyone signed up). Furthermore, students largely produced well-designed and well-reasoned resource pages for their peers.

To wrap up here, I want to point to the above sample from a student-produced page (this time from our Motivation topic). As these students pointed out, research has shown that students are “more likely to stick with learning if the challenge in manageable and has value to them.” One of the best elements of using Google Sites for this kind of collaboration is that it presents a manageable and meaningful challenge – students work hard to become experts and then produce a tool that is useful both to them and to their peers. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with the same question I ended my corresponding Collaborative Learning Days talk with:

What will your students make?

Links:

• CLD Spring 2021 presentation slides
• Google Sites
• Copy of the Fall 2020 Ed Psych Wiki
• Tech Scouts Helpline: Tech.Scouts@kirkwood.edu

I use Microsoft Office Ink technology for grade criteria sheets that mix typed text and written comments. This is a good use for the Apple Pencil, an iPad, and Microsoft Word. Using a rubric in Talon is often a better way to develop criteria and student feedback, but sometimes the criteria or the existing grade form doesn’t easily translate into a Talon rubric.

Requirements
This method is just a form of annotation using Word, so you can do this with any tablet, stylus, and Microsoft Word. Depending on your tablet size, you may need to buy a subscription to Office 365 to use Word. I use a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with a keyboard and this hardware is ideal for this process.

Description of the process
I start with an existing Word document. The only real modification needed for this speech evaluation form was to create text boxes where longer, hand-written comments usually go. You can see the box on the right.

Once I have a document to use as a template for student work, I save a copy for the individual students’ work. iPads tend to be set to autosave, which can be convenient, but not useful when you want to reuse a document. (I have not had good success using Word template files, with the extension .dotx, on iPads, so I use regular .docx document files. This may be a quirk with the file system on the iPad.)

Next, I fill out the form. I use the Apple pencil for short bits of information, such as numbers for scores. The text box is for more detailed feedback, which I type.

Once I have completed the grading form, I share it with a student by printing it or through grade feedback in Talon. Using a big tablet like the 12.9 inch iPad Pro makes uploading to Talon easy with split screen multitasking. This creates one window for Word and one window for a web browser. 

In Talon, rather than type comments in the feedback box, I select “Insert Stuff” in the HTML Editor above the text input box. The icon for “Insert Stuff” is a little triangle in a black box, similar to the YouTube logo. The screenshot below shows the result of opening Talon in a browser window in split screen after clicking the “Insert Stuff” icon and choosing to upload a file.

Once the file is uploaded, you can label the link that students will see in the feedback box. The students will then be able to click the link, download the Word document, and view the feedback.

This is a good technique if you have the required hardware and software and you have a unique criteria sheet that is not easily reproduced in a Talon rubric. I like using the iPad as a change of pace anyway, so this is a good technique for me to give detailed feedback.

For further information:

Draw with Ink

Blog post on Insert stuff

Using the Apple Pencil and Office 365 Ink