It’s no secret that being a teacher is a pretty tough job. There’s a lot of planning and extra time off the clock that goes into making sure that your lessons are up to the standard that you want.
Fortunately, there are a whole host of different add-ons for Google Workspace out there that can make that part of the job just a little easier. While they’re at it, many of those add-ons can actually help you to keep your students engaged and learning at their best. Here are five of the best Google Workspace add-ons.
1. Pear Deck for Google Slides
First up on this list comes Pear Deck for Google Slides. As you might imagine given its name, Pear Deck is an add-on that enhances what you can achieve with Google Slides.
On its own, Google Slides is a great tool to allow you to present your ideas to your students, but as an educational tool, it can be pretty limited. There is no way for students to interact with your content, and no way for you to get information back from your students.
Pear Deck aims to fix this problem by allowing your Google Slides to become an interactive learning tool. There are a couple of different ways you can do this. The simplest and potentially most useful way to do this is by adding interactive questions to your slides.
These can be questions such as temperature checks to get a read on how everybody is feeling about the content, or text and number response prompts to allow students to respond directly.
There are a ton of other interactive questions available such as reflections, drawing and draggable slides, and more. You can also share student responses anonymously on your own projector or smart screen, which gives students a safe way to learn from one another.
2. formLimiter
Next up, we have formLimiter. While formLimiter may not be one of many teacher's tools you can use to better engage online students, it is nonetheless one of the most valuable.
formLimiter is an add-on for Google Forms that allows you to set automatic shut-off points for your Google Forms. This can be after a specific number of responses, at a specific date and time, or even based on a spreadsheet cell.
This is great for a wide variety of different uses. If you have a signup sheet, for example, you may want to limit the number of people who can sign up based on availability. Alternatively, you may have a test you want to automatically shut off at a specific time.
You can adjust what happens when formLimiter stops accepting form responses as well. The add-on comes with the ability to set a custom message when submissions close, as well as whether or not you’d like to be notified by email when it does.
3. Kami
If you often feel like you print out too many worksheets and want a great way to reduce how much you print while also increasing classroom engagement, then Kami might just be able to do that for you.
Kami is an add-on for Google Drive that allows you to take existing documents such as PDFs or Word documents and interact with them in a wide variety of ways. This includes annotating, drawing, commenting, and more.
When you then share these documents with your students, they’ll be able to see the ways that you’ve enhanced them and interact with them themselves. They can use Kami to fill out the documents, and once returned you can grade them in-app.
The main appeal with Kami is that there’s a lot you can do, so no matter what you’re looking for, you’re likely to find it. If you need to insert or edit math and musical symbols, Kami can support that. If you need to draw or insert shapes or images, that can be done, too.
4. Flubaroo
Next up on this list is Flubaroo, which is an add-on for Google Sheets that aims to try and simplify the way that you grade and analyze student performance.
To say that Flubaroo is an add-on for Google Sheets is admittedly a little bit misleading, however. In truth, it works as a bridge between Google Forms and Google Sheets that allows you to more easily take the results from Google Forms tests and worksheets and easily input the results into Google Sheets documents.
Flubaroo does most of the work here for you. You just need to set up some basic information, such as how you’re grading each question, and what answer key to use. From there, Flubaroo will analyze the results from your students and output them into a Google Sheets document.
What’s great about this is how you can easily identify which students are falling behind, thanks to information about their average scores, which Flubaroo can even make a histogram of. You can also easily identify what questions many students missed so that you have a better idea of where to focus in the future.
5. Lumio by SMART
Finally, we have Lumio by SMART. If you’re looking for a tool to make static lessons more engaging in a variety of different ways, then Lumio might just be what you’re looking for. If not, there are plenty of other Google Classroom tips that can shake up your teaching.
Lumio aims to promote a more active approach to learning by allowing you to incorporate student devices into more interactive lessons. For example, with Lumio, you can create collaborative workspaces where students can collaborate and create together. You can also integrate more game-based activities into your lessons.
The add-on itself is for Google Drive, and is a great way to easily put together more engaging lessons for your students.
Find a Better Way to Teach
As you can see, there are a wide variety of different Google Workspace add-ons out there that can drastically change the way that you teach and your students learn.
Depending on your lesson plans and your kids, you may want to give just one or all of them a go. Luckily, they’re easy to install and easy to remove, so there’s not a lot of reason not to give them a try.