Teaching Math with Google Apps: 50 G Suite Activities by Alice Keeler and Diana Herrington

Foreward by Jo Boaler

Published by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc. 2017

This book opens with a foreward by Jo Boaler, with a call for educators to transform math classes. She references the Forbes list of skills needed for employment such as teamwork, problem solving, communication – all of which she argues can be enhanced through collaboration with technology. She also addresses the issue of “speed” and mathematics and how some students believe they are not “math people” because they are not fast. Boaler explains how the simple submissions of thinking and solutions on a Google form can take away the focus on speed in mathematics.

Authors Alice and Diana have both been math teachers at the high school and college levels. They emphasize the importance of digital tools in reimagining the math class with a focus on collaboration. They outline seven ways to use Google Apps to teach math:

1) Post Directions

2) Watch Students Work

3) Collaboration

4) Shift Students to Higher DOK Levels

5) Students Research

6) Shift to Facilitator

7) Conversations for Depper Understanding

The majority of the book is dedicated to overviewing 50 activities to teach math with Google Apps such as “Small Group Investigation,” “Discuss Strategies,” “Analyze Data Sets” and “Create Geometry Constructions”. The authors suggest asking yourself, “how does this activity make learning better?” Most of the activities use Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Sheets or Google Slides and provides the advantages of using each format. Also used are Google Search, Google Forms, Google Drive, Google Chrome, Google Drawing, and Google Flights,

Links to examples and tutorials are provided.  Some key reminders are interspersed throughout this section:

Teach like YouTube and Google exist.

The person doing the work is the person doing the learning.

We are a community of learners and we help each other get better.

The back matter shares examples from classrooms and highlights DOK levels (Depth of Knowledge), the 4 Cs (creativity, critical thinking, communicate and collaborate), mathematical practices for the CCSS and the 5E instructional cycle (engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate).

There are lots of great ideas for tech integration and student collaboration throughout this book. Be mindful that some districts have policies or concerns regarding students having gmail accounts and as Alice has clearly said on Twitter – Outlook and Google apps aren’t really compatible. If having gmail accounts for students is frowned upon, like in my district (Richmond), take some of the ideas from this book and figure out how to make them work with the platforms that you are able to use! That will be one of my goals for the coming year as I see so much opportunity in technology enabling  our secondary students to engage in in-class, cross-class and cross-school collaboration around mathematics.

~Janice