Just after I was hired, the athletic director approached me and asked if I would be interested in coaching track & field. I was a little wary of the time commitment but ended up saying yes. Last year, in my second year as an assistant coach, I was able to really experiment with using google docs (before my district went to apps for education). This pre-season form was our first experiment…
It worked pretty well for keeping up with athletes’ training routines. Once the season started, I knew the coaches were sick of spending hours together after practice figuring out who would be running what at all of the meets. I was also done with constantly sending different versions of everything back and forth. I convinced the other two coaches to jump on board with google docs (you don’t have to have a gmail account to use gdocs!). We shared spreadsheets to organize meet entries, keep track of top times & varsity letter points and create scouting reports & rosters. We were then able to allow anyone with the link to view these documents so that students and parents could access them on our facebook page and website (social networking with coaching & teaching to come later).
Throughout the season we used two more forms to gather information – one to get contact information from parents and another to collect RSVPs for the end of the year banquet. Throughout the year, google docs saved us countless hours and headaches. We were able to edit the schedule without having to re-send it to parents each time we changed it. We were able to quickly and easily get information to our athletes. In addition, google docs are compatible with most smartphones and other devices so people could access the information wherever & whenever they needed.
Using google docs to make more efficient use of our time as coaches was when I first really started to get obsessed. This year I have been able to use google docs almost primarily in my classroom…more to come later.
te(a)ch french 