All About GAFE

Abstract

This study was completed at a small, rural Middle School (SRMS) is a small rural school on Hawaii Island, serving grades six through eight in the South Kona district. SRMS recently adopted Google Apps for Education (GAFE) as a tool to facilitate teaching and collaboration between teachers and teachers and teachers and students. To allow teachers who need guidance or support using GAFE tools, the researcher designed a web-based, self-paced learning module geared towards SRMS’ faculty needs, on how to use the basic GAFE tools. Faculty were invited to participate in the evaluation of the website and provide data and feedback on how the website was able to meet the needs of faculty members in teaching them how to use GAFE tools and in making them more comfortable using GAFE tools as a collaboration and teaching tool. The study revealed the modules that presented basic knowledge on how to use GAFE tools as a collaboration and a teaching tool were most in need for members of the SRMS faculty with a low comfort levels of GAFE tools. However, the research results also revealed that besides written instructions, a more basic step by step approach, coupled with short instructional videos were preferred for each of the GAFE basic tools and were preferred over detailed written instructions.