Yesterday I attended an excellent professional development workshop on using Google Docs in the classroom. I have been aware of Google Docs for some time now, but yesterday was the first that I ever really mucked around with it. Wow. Incredibly powerful, very helpful, and free – compliments of Google. (Simply turn over all copyrights to them and you’re on your way. Heck! no problem!)
What I liked about this PD workshop
The workshop was put on by one of our school board’s facilitators. It was nice to have someone cutting edge presenting this, someone that shares my philosophy: our students will be on social media and interactive websites anyway, and Web 2.0 is their future, so let’s teach them how to use these tools safely and properly.
The presentation for the workshop, which had been created with Google Docs by two of our board’s facilitators, was available ahead of time through our board’s website. Participants had the option of arriving better prepared to learn about this technology.
Also, as we met in a computer lab, our facilitator walked us through the setting up of our educational Google Docs accounts, and we were given tasks and time to familiarize ourselves with this powerful tool.
What has initially impressed me about Google Docs
I like that Google Docs is compatible with, and replaces the need for, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I’m impressed with the quality and power of these standard applications, offered in an environment for collaboration and peer editing. The editing features are sufficient and the final product is pleasing.
I like the speed of the auto-saving and sharing. In groups, our peer edits were visible in less than a minute; presumably, this would have been much faster had we not been on our school server. With the speed of Google Docs and the Chat feature for each document’s collaborators, we can say goodbye to the slow delay of sizable email attachments, lazy email practice, and the mess of multiple versions (v2, v6, vsub). Instead, revision history maintains a record of all.
Also, of course, the collaboration available on the Google Calendar should be handy for the English department, for the school staff, and someday, for the parents…
… Which brings me to my final conclusions
In a perfect world, I would implement Google Docs into my classroom tomorrow (with parental consent for each student, and administration’s support). For now, because of security concerns, Google Docs simply becomes another tool for me to use for collaborating with my fellow teachers.
I really like the collaborative/share feature of Google Docs, which I learned about when participating in the National Writing Project’s Letters to the Next President project.
My Pre-AP English classes are now participating in an “online lit circle” (as I call it!) as they each create and post questions to a document that I sent their “discussion directors” on a poem we read in class.
I love online literature circles, and I can see how Google Docs could be excellent for that. Great idea, too, to use it with poetry.
Although I’ve been using GoogleDocs for two years, I hadn’t thought of the literature circle idea. I really like that! Thanks!