Thing #18

I played with Google Docs for my Discovery Exercise. I'd played with it a little bit before for Thing #7. But this time I took the time to go through their help pages with all kinds of explanations and how to's. They were very clear. Then I played around a bit with a document or two.

I think for my students Google Docs can be very helpful. It can allow them to work on an assignment at school, save to Google Docs and then open that same document and work on it at home. They don't need a zip or flash drive or any 'thing' to help transmit their data to and from school. The only draw back I see for students is that they may not have a Google account and I'm not sure about my district's opinion on requiring students to get a Google account.

I like the feature that would allow people to see your documents and even edit them. That could be very helpful for collaboration with teachers. I can see creating or uploading a document, maybe an instruction sheet for a research project, and 'sharing' it with all of the teachers involved, allowing them to edit the document. I think this could save time as well as paper, creating and sharing drafts over and over again until something is ready to be published. I think it would be helpful amoung my peers too for the same reasons.

I think Google Docs has some advantages over just using Microsoft Office because it is web based and allows for sharing and collaborating in a way that can be more efficient than emailing documents back and forth for editing purposes.