Jul 28 2008
K12Online 2007 “Oodles of Googles” presentation.
This is my reflection for the K12Online 2007 reflection on Sharon Betts’ presentation titled Oodles of Googles.
Sharon Betts’ presentation gave an excellent overview of the capabilities of GoogleDocs and then some! I have used GoogleDocs and also Google notebook fairly often, but have not used all of the capabilities that were demonstrated in the presentation. What I appreciated learning about here was how you can form groups and have discussions. I think that would be useful especially if we could get our media group formed as a discussion group when we work on any document together. I have only used GoogleDocs to collaborate in writing shared documents. I love it for that especially with my usual collaborator for online classes, Carol Midthun We most often will meet at Bruegger’s Bagels with our laptops. We can then talk, eat, drink coffee or diet cola and also write together! I think the first time we tried this it felt a little odd (kind of like dueling laptops) but after awhile, it felt very comfortable and we settled into summers of bagels and writing together. I signed up to use the notebook, but so far it hasn’t been a tool that I could use. If I was an undergrad college or high school student, I would want to know about these tools however. As an elementary media specialist, I hope that middle and high school students are being introduced to these useful tools.
As an aside, I did try to use the presentation tools in GoogleDocs to create a lesson that I was doing with my students last year. It ended up a little quirky. Enough that I couldn’t trust the right information or slide to come up reliably, that I went back to good old Powerpoint for the rest of the year. Second and third graders get restless and aren’t as willing to wait for the tech so there are times when the tried and true make sense.
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