Aug

8

Google Docs Rocks!

Filed Under Collaboration 

I’ve been trying to come up with an outline for my new Grade 9 Social Studies course. I’m collaborating on it with another teacher and, it seems, the two of us just can’t seem to get together.

Well, Google Docs provides a simple and pretty cool solution to that.  Last year Google bought the site Writely.com which was a basic word processor. They added a little jazz to it, renamed it, and, voila, Google Docs.

The beauty of Google Docs is not that it’s a pretty decent word processor (it doesn’t do footnotes but it does most other things), but that you can share you documents. I can make my course outline available to my partner teacher and she can edit it freely (apparently while we’re both online). The sharing can be done by as many people as you like. While it’s always possible to attach a document to an e-mail message and send it around, it’s difficult to know who has the latest copy and thus hard to stop people from duplicating each other’s work. With Google Docs the document is online and so you always know where the most up to date version is.

Very cool. I love this online collaboration stuff.

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