Child, You’re BUSTED!

 

Though this segment does not officially qualify as “Google Classroom”, it dovetails sweetly with the content we just finished when we looked at assigning students work in a way that allows you, the teacher, to view their progress via thumbnails. This little segment is going to look at what is called the “Version History” in Google. I call it the “time machine” through which I can go back in time and see a child’s actual work/effort and progress on a document, slides project or spreadsheet done in sheets. 

This is a teacher’s BEST FRIEND.

To check it out, go into your own Google Drive and open a document – preferably one that you have worked on over a period of time, with multiple revisions.

Now that you have the document in front of you, click on “File” and select “Version History”-> See Version History

On the right side of your screen, a new panel will have opened, and it shows every time you’ve opened the document, and if you made changes to the document you can see what the changes were. Should you ever need to “recover” a document, this is how you do it. For example, if a child has “lost” their work (another kid did something and they closed it instead of pressing “ctrl” + “z” to undo whatever the other kid did) you can generally retrieve it by using the version history trick. It may be missing a sentence as compared to what they had done before, but it’s better than starting over and your student will be grateful!!

But that’s only one use of the version history feature. I used it many times at parent-teacher interviews to sleuth out the truth or fiction to a student’s claims of having completed the work but “the computer ate it.” Nope, not with Google. Nothing gets eaten in Google unless the student entirely deletes the file. This can’t really happen when you assign the work in the manner we discussed in the previous segment.

This little video should help make this make sense…