John Funchion | Google Drive

Student Perspectives

Instructor Perspective

Google Drive in the Introductory Literature Course (Spring 2015)

John Funchion, Associate Professor of English and American Studies

For my ENG 210: “Con Artists, Tricksters, and Card Sharks in American Literature” course, I experimented with Google Drive as an instructional platform in consultation with UM’s Department of Academic Technologies. After an initial adjustment period, I found that my students responded exceptionally well to Drive and the many applications it supports.  The experience, in fact, has radically transformed the way I think introductory literature courses should be taught to non-humanities majors. 

When it came to posting course materials and assignment guidelines, I found Drive as a cloud storage platform to be both intuitive and time-saving. Students also submitted some of their work via Drive, which allowed them to easily share their work for peer feedback. Since Drive automatically synched updates on our PCs and mobile devices, both the students and I found it easy to access course content and to remain aware of any updates.

Drive, however, offered far more than just file-sharing capabilities. For example, with Cheyne Murray’s assistance, I administered course quizzes and short writing responses using Google Forms.  When I used Google Forms for in-class short responses or quizzes, I could monitor students as they crafted replies to critical questions about the texts and films we examined in the class. I could then easily scan all of their submissions in the form of a spread sheet, enabling me to shape class discussion around their critical responses. Drive, in other words, helped me tailor class conversations to their grasp of the material for that day. On those few days when discussion seemed stilted, I always knew if it stemmed from a lack of preparation or if it instead had to do with the difficulty of reading for that day. After class I was able to seamlessly record each student’s performance on the quiz into my class’s grading spreadsheet.  

Finally, Drive also enabled to me create shared documents for class group work. This feature profoundly improved my students’ critical analyses of the texts in the class. In a literature course with larger enrollment, this function became a wonderful way to have students work on close textual examinations. When I began teaching Herman Melville’s notoriously complex novel, The Confidence-Man, for example, class discussion initially proved to be a struggle. My students, many of whom were not humanities majors, understandably didn’t know how to approach the text. Rather than diving right into discussion in subsequent class meetings, I had them annotate in groups select passages from the text in a Google document. Again, I could monitor their annotations real-time, which meant that I could be sure they remained focused on the task at hand and see where they found parts of the novel to be especially challenging. Then I could project their annotations to the rest of the class, and we could discuss their readings all together. From that point forward, their examination of the novel became far sharper, and our discussions became incredibly animated and lively.

I will definitely be using Google Drive again, especially in courses that attract a large number of non-humanities majors. Drive and the various functions it supports dramatically improved the quality of this course. And UM’s Department of Academic Technologies also helped me shape its use for my course during a series of one-on-one consultations. Thanks to those useful exchanges, I was able to ensure that Drive enhanced the instructional quality of my course rather than detracted from it. Most importantly, Drive helped me get my students excited about literature and to see how it can profoundly shape our perception of the world and the values we hold.