Google Add-ons .. wow!!!

Today a good colleague introduced me to a new Google Add-on - 'Texthelp - Study Skills'. I showed the tool to two classes today, and frankly they were wowed.

Here's the problem that has been looking for this solution. As a laptop school our students now mostly take notes most of the time mostly on their laptops.. you get the idea. Our concerns have included their ability to keep their work organised, and to retrieve that work and use it purposefully when revising.

So they have notes that they may have taken in GoogleDocs, or Word (mostly), and then there are those articles that we have distributed via our learning management system Moodle as pdfs.

I showed the boys how to:

• Import a pdf into their Google Drive and convert into a Google Doc. Of course the tool can be used directly with their own notes if they have used Google Docs to take notes in the first place, no conversion required.
• Highlight using the Add-on "Texthelp - Study Skills"

• Collate their highlights into a summary document using the Add-on
• Finally (and this isn't the Add-on) to write their own summary/synthesis of their highlights in order to cement their learning.

What a great way to engage students with text. Interestingly I was attending some staff PD this afternoon, and grabbed an online journal article to support the topic we were discussing. My first response was to import it into my Google Drive, covert it, and start annotating using this tool. Great.