Being a boy can be a serious liability in today’s classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won’t sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study, leads teachers to underestimate their intellectual and academic abilities. “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools,” says psychologist Michael Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”

(MORE: Boys Love Making Rainbow Loom Bracelets, Defying Stereotype and Delighting Moms Everywhere)

These “defective girls” are not faring well academically. Compared with girls, boys earn lower grades, win fewer honors and are less likely to go to college. One education expert has quipped that if current trends continue, the last male will graduate from college in 2068. In today’s knowledge-based economy, success in the classroom has never been more crucial to a young person’s life prospects. Women are adapting; men are not.

Some may say, “Too bad for the boys.” The ability to regulate one’s impulses, sit still and pay attention are building blocks of success in school and in life. As one critic told me, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy or unfocused workers. That is absurd: unproductive workers are adults — not 5- and 6-year-old children who depend on us to learn how to become adults. If boys are restive and unfocused, we must look for ways to help them do better.

Here are three modest proposals for reform:1. Bring Back Recess
Schools everywhere have cut back on breaks. Recess, in many schools, may soon be a thing of the past. According to a research summary by Science Daily, since the 1970s, schoolchildren have lost close to 50% of their unstructured outdoor playtime. Thirty-nine percent of first-graders today get 20 minutes of recess each day — or less. (By contrast, children in Japan get 10 minutes of play each hour.)

Prolonged confinement in classrooms diminishes children’s concentration and leads to squirming and restlessness. And boys appear to be more seriously affected by recess deprivation than girls. “Parents should be aware,” warn two university researchers, “that classroom organization may be responsible for their sons’ inattention and fidgeting and that breaks may be a better remedy than Ritalin.”

(MORE: Do Teachers Really Discriminate Against Boys?)

2. Turn Boys Into Readers
A few years ago, novelist Ian McEwan found he had many duplicate books in his library. So he and his son went to a nearby park during the lunch hour and tried to give them away. Young women eagerly accepted them. The guys, says McEwan, “frowned in suspicion, or distaste. When they were assured they would not have to part with their money, they still could not be persuaded. ‘Nah, nah. Not for me.’ ”

“Not for me,” is a common male reaction to reading, and it shows up in test scores. Year after year, in all age groups, across all ethnic lines, in every state in the union, boys score lower than girls on national reading tests. Good reading skills are — need I say? — critical to academic and workplace success. The British, faced with a similar literacy gap, launched a national campaign to engage boys with the written word.

In a major report released last year by the British Parliament’s Boys’ Reading Commission, the authors openly acknowledge sex differences and use a color-coded chart to illustrate boys’ and girls’ different reading preferences: girls prefer fiction, magazines, blogs and poetry; boys like comics, nonfiction and newspapers.

It is hard to imagine the U.S. Department of Education producing such a report. So far, the plight of boys is nowhere on its agenda. But if American parents and educators adopted the British commission’s top three recommendations, it is likely we would significantly narrow the gender gap in reading:

• Every teacher should have an up-to-date knowledge of reading materials that will appeal to disengaged boys.
• Every boy should have weekly support from a male reading role model.
• Parents need access to information on how successful schools are in supporting boys’ literacy.

Boys will read when they find material they like. Guysread.com is the place to go for lists of books that have proved irresistible to boys.

(MORE: When Homework Is a Waste of Time)

3. Work With the Young Male Imagination
In his delightful Boy Writers: Reclaiming their Voices, celebrated author and writing instructor Ralph Fletcher advises teachers to consider their assignments from the point of view of boys. Too many writing teachers, he says, take the “confessional poet” as the classroom ideal. Personal narratives full of emotion and self-disclosure are prized; stories describing video games, skateboard competitions or a monster devouring a city are not.

Peg Tyre’s The Trouble With Boys illustrates the point. She tells the story of a third-grader in Southern California named Justin who loved Star Wars, pirates, wars and weapons. An alarmed teacher summoned his parents to school to discuss a picture the 8-year-old had drawn of a sword fight — which included several decapitated heads. The teacher expressed “concern” about Justin’s “values.” The father, astonished by the teacher’s repugnance for a typical boy drawing, wondered if his son could ever win the approval of someone who had so little sympathy for the child’s imagination.

Teachers have to come to terms with the young male spirit. As Fletcher urges, if we want boys to flourish, we are going to have to encourage their distinctive reading, writing, drawing and even joke-telling propensities. Along with personal “reflection journals,” Fletcher suggests teachers permit fantasy, horror, spoofs, humor, war, conflict and, yes, even lurid sword fights.

As the word gets out about the many advantages of using Google docs, lots of teachers are becoming experts at creating and sharing documents in Google Drive – as well as exercising the “comments” and “see revision history” tools to provide student feedback on writing assignments (as I described inmy first Google Drive article).

If you’ve rolled out Google Drive in your classes, either via individual accounts or throughGoogle Apps for Education, then you know you can effectively employ it to share and collect assignments from your students. However, to save yourself from being inundated with electronic documents, you need to be sure that part of your lesson preparation includes effective workflow planning. Otherwise, you may find some tire marks on those carefully constructed lessons as Google Drive’s powerful features careen out of control.

Here are a few tips that have worked for me in the classroom.

Distributing Material to Students

If you are having your students work on an electronic assignment, then Google Drive can be an effective and efficient method of distributing instructions, worksheets, and other documents for students to use. But to assure a good flow, you must first assess a few key elements. Do you want students to be able to modify the document? And, if so, for the class as a whole or just individually?

Google Drive allows you to share content in several ways. If you want to distribute instructions to the group (but not allow them to inadvertently change them), then be sure that when you click on “share,” you select the appropriate access. The choices:

• “Can view” will allow students to see the document only.

• “Can comment” means they can view the document and leave comments but not change the document at all.

• “Can edit” means they can edit the document in its entirety but not delete it.

In my classes, I have found it useful to post instructions as “view only” and encourage students to ask follow up questions in class or via email. Some teachers may find the comments feature effective for questions and follow up.

Sometimes you create a document that you want students to modify—for example, a series of questions about a reading assignment or data from a lab exercise. If it is a document that you would like the class or a group to modify together, then the share feature offering “can edit” privileges will suffice.

However, if it is an individual assignment, then you need to add an extra step to make sure that the original document doesn’t accidently get modified improperly for and by everyone. For individual assignments, share the document with your students offering “view only” privileges and instruct students to then make a copy that they can then modify. (They do this by opening the document and clicking File > Make a Copy.)

This copying step will ensure they have the document you would like them to use but limit the editing to an individual user. If you have students working in small groups, you can assign a group leader who is responsible for this step and sharing with his or her classmates.

Turning in Assignments

The next crucial area for students working in Google Drive is a protocol for turning in assignments. Trust me, you do not want 80 “untitled” assignments showing up. Nor do you want to try and figure out who “swimluver@gmail.com” is in your classroom. A well-planned protocol can save you time and headache. There are a myriad of methods you can employ to keep assignments labeled and organized. Here are a few that worked for me.

Shared Class Folder – I create a shared folder for each one of my classes. This is the default repository for all class assignments. For larger projects, I create a sub-folder (e.g. “Research Essay” or “Video Project”). I do this in anticipation of multiple assignments on the same topic.

Consistent Naming – The next element I tackle is how I want students to name their file. I have gotten 85 documents titled “homework” and it is crazy-making! The title should identify the assignment as well as the student (in that order); for example: “pg18 – Jones” or “Video Script – Doe”. This allows me, at a glance, to see who has turned in what. If it is a project that requires multiple steps, like a research paper, I may include a draft number: “Essay Draft 1 – Jones” and “Essay Draft 2 – Jones”.

Reinforce the Naming Rules – An effective naming protocol can keep both you and your students sane and organized. Keep in mind that students can be quick to forget to use the naming protocol, especially if they are rushing to finish an assignment. I have found the need to assess some penalties to ensure that they follow this essential procedure. Currently, if my students forget to properly name their assignment, they are assessed an immediate 50% penalty on their grade. I do tend to give them 12 hours to fix the naming to get those points back. I will tell you: most students don’t forget more than once!

Plan ahead and reap the benefits

Google Drive is a great tool to distribute content to your students and to have them return assignments in all media (the Drive repository allows students to submit not only traditional documents, but video, mind-maps, images, and more). By effectively planning your distribution and return protocol, you cannot only be more efficient but save a great deal of time in the mundane but essential logistics of lesson planning and rollout. These are ideas that have worked in my classroom, but I encourage you to explore protocols that meet your individual needs.