In the original lesson, Dave photocopied a reading entitled "The Education of a Loyal Nazi" to help his students understand what life was like for young people in Hitler's Germany. In addition to the reading, students responded to a worksheet that was printed for them to write on. You can check out the original reading and worksheet here.
Now that Dave has his own classroom set of Chromebooks, he decided to give this lesson a makeover by turning it into a HyperDoc. Dave retyped the original document on a Google Doc...it needed to be done as the original was getting difficult to read after being photocopied repeatedly over the years. He broke the document into chunks to help students make better sense of the material, and rather than creating a worksheet with fill-in-the-blank lines, Dave inserted text boxes for students to share their answers. He distributed the file as an Assignment in Google Classroom, making a copy for each student. You can view the transformed version of the assignment below:
Conclusion
Dave's transformation might seem small...after all, the assignment is pretty much the same: read a primary source/academic article and answer some questions. However, the transformation now benefits both teacher and student. First, the students have the ability to collaborate by leveraging Google Docs' "Share" capabilities. Second, the teacher can now give feedback to students that is both timely and meaningful. HyperDocs don't have to be complicated--keeping it simple can have a powerful impact for teachers and students.
