Most of us have at least heard about Google Docs but may have been too busy to explore this application or consider what it might offer to us or our students. A colleague, Julien Marion, and I discussed this last week while we were having lunch. I had used Google Docs only in a superficial way up to this point, but after our discussion I began to explore this application more fully. I discovered an amazing tool which not only allows real-time collaboration on papers and spreadsheets, but also tracks revisions so that Instructors can see who has made contributions. I’ve included a short video below which I found on YouTube. There are hundreds more on the same topic (i.e. “Using Google Docs for Collaboration”). I really encourage you to watch this short video and perhaps even show it in your class and encourage your project teams to give it a try. You could even reserve the computer lab and set up a real-time experiment with your class. If you decide to give this a try, I would be interested to hear how your experiment turned out, as well as how to make using Google Docs even more effective. There are likely many more ways you can think of to use this application; again, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and ideas, email me at: rupchurch@belhaven.edu
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