Thursday, September 19, 2013

Using Doctopus to create additional connections with students in class

+Andrew Stillman is a scripting demi-god. I have been using Doctopus in conjunction with gClassFolders. It has completely changed my workflow and my classroom. I have always used a lot of technology in my math classes, but Doctopus allows me to connect with my students in a meaningful way in real time.

I have already detailed in an earlier blog post about how I launch assignments from the gClassHub to my students.

Once my students have access to the document, they work on the assignment. Something unexpected happened at this step and changed my fundamental outlook on my teaching philosophy. I was clicking through the links on the Doctopus sheet to see the progress that my students were making and I was able to leave some comments for the students at points where they were making some mistakes or were unclear how to proceed.

It was a great interaction and I was able to impact students in real time in their documents when they were reluctant to admit they needed help. Having this alternate way to interact with them was really cool!