Thing 16

I have never used or had even heard of Google Docs before. There certainly seems to be many ways I can use this in my professional and personal life. I liked many of the templates offered for budgets and calendars and I these I might begin using in my personal life.

Professionally, I think this may finally be the way to go about student writing. The level of my students do is certainly much less than are doing in their English classes and will remain that way. But, I would like to get them writing more and I don't like to take too much time in class because they really need to be speaking the target language. Google Docs seems like a great place for them to keep an on going journal that I could check on periodically and comment on. I also like for them to make corrections on their own work and other students' work. Again, Google Docs seems like it could be a great place to do this. I liked that other educators felt that it can raise the quality of the student's work because it is out there. I know that many students take time to write well for me in a testing situation, but sometimes their responses to practice questions is really below their level and knowing that everyone will see it will make a difference.

Last year our school was working with a change in our attendance policy. We spent time emailing the proposal to all teachers and even had to make some hard copies in order to get feedback from the staff. Google Docs seems like it would have been perfect for such a task.

I didn't get a chance to play around as much with this as possible because I am away from home and my computer so I don't have any documents to experiment with...Google Docs could have solved this situation:) I know that I try to keep my school files on a flash drive so I can access them at work or at school, but ultimately I sometimes forget it or misplace it and so on. Google Docs would really give me access to those files anywhere.

Some issues that might arise with students using Google Docs in the classroom setting are email addresses, access to computers, and editing procedures. I don't know if there is a way of setting up a group email list, but that might help with getting everyone together. I know that our media center has computers for student use, but the hours are very limited so if a student does not have access to a computer at home, this could be a problem. Finally, I'm not familiar enough with the program to know now how to set up editing procedures and work with commenting.

I know I still have a lot of questions about Google Docs, but I think there are many possibilities and I plan to seek out a couple of colleagues next week to get some practice with this.