Every year about this time I’m busy trying to put together our Regional Heritage Fair along with our great team of volunteer teachers, museum staff, business men and others. Being the guy who registers the kids and assigns them to workshops, I spend a lot of time at a computer in the weeks leading up the Fair.

With Google Docs I’ve set up an online form to register the kids. This saves hours of typing the names of kids and their projects off of hand written registration forms. It also allow me a convenient way to assign the kids to workshops since I can download all the information into an Excel spreadsheet and manipulate it any way I want.

When I’m done assigning students to workshops, I print off name tags for the kids using the mail merge function of Word. Then I’m racing to print participation certificates for 380 kids using the mail merge in MS Publisher.

Before I joined the planning committee for our Heritage Fair, all of this was done manually (well, with a computer), with names and such being cut and pasted from one document to another. It was time consuming, and I’ve learned enough to speed up the process a bit.

What I find interesting is that some of the local schools run trackmeets, etc, and I still see phys ed teachers having the kids register manually, on paper, and then they typing up the results.  With a Google Doc form all that could be automated.

Our school registrar gets the kids to sign up for courses for the new year by filling in sheets of paper and handing them in. She then inputs that data into an appropriate program and spends hours and hours at it. With a Google Doc form, so much of that process could be automated. I’ve suggested it, but there’s been no change so far.

There is a reluctance to use technology, perhaps a fear of it. I should point out that our planning committee nixed my idea to have school pay registration fees for our Heritage Fair online using PayPal or something like that. It seemed like I was the only one who’d bought something online because the rest of them thought the process for online payment was too complicated.

I’m not sure how you get people to adopt new and ultimately simpler ways to do their tasks, but I’m still trying. The battle goes on.