3rd and 4th Grade Have Gone Google Drive

Exciting times at Harding Elementary in the IC!  Third and fourth grade students have gone Google Drive!  This allows our students to jump into the 21st century to learn technology skills and tools that will benefit them not only this year, but in the years come!

I consider Google Drive to be an important "life skill," as students will need to use Google Drive for the rest of their lives.  Google Drive is becoming more common and mainstreamed into education, businesses, and work areas.

For the last month, during IC Skills, students in grades three and four have been learning and practicing how to log-in, use various Google Drive's (specifically Google Docs and Google Draw), and the importance of logging off when done working in the computer lab.

Eventually students will learn how to use Google Presentations, Google Forms, and many other amazing apps!  Typing Club, PowToon EDU, ScootPad, Khan Academy, MindMeister (mind map tool), Lucidcharts (mind map tool), RealTime Whiteboard, etc. are just a few additional apps I would LOVE to teach our students how to use!

I wanted to blog about this exciting and revolutionizing much sooner, especially when we started a month ago, but I quickly learned that students needed quite a bit of my assistance, to start out.  The students required more attention and assistance with logging in, which didn't allow me time to take pictures to post on this blog, as well as time to observe and reflect on students' learning, skills, progress, etc..  Thankfully, after introducing how to log-in on the first day to a class section of third grade students and a class section of fourth grade students, I was able to make a few changes in how I explained, modeled, and taught log-in procedures.  It went much smoother on Day C and Day E, than it did on that Day A of the first cycle I introduced Google Drive, but it still required lots of assistance.

So, what is the students' usernames and passwords?  Students log-in with a specific username and password, as assigned by our district tech team.

The username for each student is as follows...

• First letter of their first name, followed by the student's entire last name, followed by the last two digits of their graduation year, and finally "@masoncityschools.org."

The password for each student is as follows...

• six or seven digit lunch account number followed by each student's two letter initial

EXAMPLE

• Username = sstaudt20@masoncityschools.org
• Password = 123456ss

After spending a month (equivalent to three 6 day cycles), students have become more fluent and at ease logging into their Google Drives.

If you are a Harding parent, please ask your student, "How do you login to Google Drive?!"  Hopefully they will be able to tell you their username, password, and how to access Google Drive.

Now that we have mastered how to log-in, we are able to move onto bigger and better adventures on Google Drive!  Stay tuned for future blog posts on how students are using Google Drive for specific purposes!