Thing Sixteen

How might you use this tool in your personal and/or professional life? What issues come to mind about using this tool with students (ie, they need email addresses to log-in)?

I have heard about Google Docs, but have never used it before today.  My fifth grade daughter used it in school for a social studies presentation that she did with an assigned group.  She really enjoyed using it because she was able to work on it at home, as were the other students in her group.  It allowed them to collaborate outside of their classroom, which was an amazing thing to see.

I could have used Google Docs very recently in my personal life.  I am the team manager for my daughter’s soccer team.  One of my tasks is to create a phone tree and contact list for the team.  I created the document using Microsoft Word, printed it out, and took it to the first game so that parents could review it and make changes as necessary.  I can see how this process of review and editing could have been done more easily in Google Docs.  While playing around in Docs, I uploaded the soccer team phone tree from my computer.  The first time I uploaded it, allowing the file to be converted, I lost the formatting that I had created.  I uploaded it again, without allowing the conversion, and my document appeared without any loss in formatting.  Pretty slick! 

I think I could use this tool both professionally and personally whenever I want input on a document that I am creating.  The obvious issue with this technology is that participants must have a Google account to access the document.

Incidentally, my brother in law is a technology staff member at a school district in Monroe County.  He and I were discussing Google Docs and the practicality of using it, along with its limitations.  He introduced me to a website called dropbox.com.  According to him, documents can be “dropped” into this website and then accessed from any internet connected computer workstation.  I haven’t had time to explore it yet, so don’t know if there are collaboration capabilities on the site, but am curious to see the similarities to Google Docs.