Module 3

Google Docs…where have you been all my life?

In May I went to a ‘TeachMeet’ inservice which was all about sharing our technological ideas and findings with other teachers (K-12) – this is where I first heard about Google Docs.

Watching ‘Google docs in Plain English’ by commoncraft was a great introduction to the potential of Google docs. I went onto the recommended ‘Atomic Learning’ website and was concerned, to say the least, that the ‘Google docs – a focus on documents training’ tutorials took 1 hour and 13 minutes. I became less concerned when I found out that they were broken into 1-5 minute clips :D    Everything from there was easy enough - the creation of the document, the editing of the document and the sharing of the document. I liked how the creator had the option to choose if the collaborator/s could ‘edit’ or ‘view’. I especially appreciated the fact that the permissions could be restricted as well.

If only I had this in uni! Doing those rubbish group work assignments where everyone had to meet up at the same unsuitable time would have been limited! Relating to the classroom though…I can see this being AMAZING for older children who do a lot of group work especially high school however, I think the only limitation is with the younger children who don’t necessarily work as collaboratively. Saying that though, brainstorming just became a whooole lot more motivating. I think personally, I will find this site most beneficial for my professional self – the one who creates worksheets, then alters and resaves, then saves to flash disk…etc. Google docs has potentially just become my new best friend!