Basically I liked Google Docs. I have plans to use it and I hope enough other people have learned about it so that my plan is successful. I had a little trouble with opening up the spreadsheet and I don't know why. However, once it was sent directly to me I was able to use it very easily. It is a really cool tool to use as long as others know to use it. I have not been into this stuff until this workshop so I don't know how well people know this application.
I plan to use Google Docs to work on our Family Fun Night at the elementary. It is coming up soon and I will need to get the whole school on the same page. I don't think I could handle it with e-mail and running around all over the school will be hard to do as well. I am getting a little stressed about it but learning about Google Docs is a little bit of a help. I am not sure that enough people will know about it through this workshop in order to use it in August or September but it is worth a shot. If I have to create a bunch of documents then I might as well create them in Google Docs to allow others to help me with them.
Google docs could be good for students to peer edit writing or to work on a projects. However, I am not sure how to determine which kids are doing the lion's share of the work. If I had kids working on projects in a computer lab I might be able to keep track of it but if I want kids to do these things during computer class or at home on their own time, then I can't control it. I am not really sure how it could be used in math but Google Docs is great for reading, writing, and history classes easily. It seems like a great way to collaborate on something. In fact, it seems a lot like a wiki but with a document instead of just a site. I can imagine that all of the benefits of a wiki would be the same benefits for Google Docs only with a tangible, printable outcome.
The main issues I think of are negative. This is a great tool for writing and editing but it would be hard to keep kids from cheating or bullying others into writing for them. It seems a little untraceable unless you are constantly checking on line to see what each student is doing. Issues that the videos brought up are my same issues. Kids would be chatting, or looking at Facebook instead of working. Another issue I have is time. With everything new, there is a lot of time involved in teaching what needs to be taught on top of teaching the additional skills it takes to implement the "something new". I can see all of this technology beign really useful in social studies but I will only have 30 minutes of teaching time for this subject. I rarely finish teaching all of the TEKS in a school year and this would make that problem even worse if I took more time out to teach how to use a wiki or Google Docs instead of about the first battle of the American Revolution. The final issue is that I don't see our district doing this right away. Every classroom on the videos that had a ton of success with this had a laptop for every student. I think we are a long way from that.
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What a great idea for using Docs! Even if the entire staff hasn't been trained in it, I think that Google Docs are fairly easy to use and are very similar to Microsoft Office applications. I know how organizing a big event can get complicated and bogged down in emails, so this certainly seems like a good solution.
ReplyDeleteI agree that a Google Doc is a lot like a wiki; the main difference I see is that it can only be viewed by those with whom you choose to share it, and it does not have the same "web" capabilities that wikis do. For example, on a wiki, you can create a tool bar with links to various pages, and you can embed pictures and videos. As you pointed out, though, a Google Doc is in many ways a "printable" version of a wiki, which makes it better suited in many ways to student projects.
Of course there are LOTS of hurdles to overcome in order to be able to use this tool in the classroom. One way to solve the problem of seeing who has contributed what to a document is to assign a different colored font to each student, or to only allow one student at a time to edit each doc. I don't think that will completely solve the problem of an unfair workload among group members, but that's a problem in group work whether technology is involved or not.
Great observations! Thing 7 complete!