Google Docs

Google Docs is an excellent online tool to be able to collaborate work with others.  Emails are a thing of the past with this new technology.  All of the editing and communication process can be dealt with online and with personal privacy settings.  This technology allows people to share ideas and presentations with others by simply sharing their link with others to gain feedback and help edit the different documents.  This is definitely something that could be useful in schools.  Teachers could use this to help students out with their writing.  They are able to view students’ work and add comments in where ever they please with the students permission.  This is also an awesome place for group work because students can all be working on the same assignment from separate computers just by communicating online in their particular online workspace document.

The only downside of this technology is that it can only be used in upper grade levels.  The elementary level is not quite advanced enough to be able to use this technology in class but it can definitely be used in middle school and in high school.

Even though this would be too difficult for elementary students, this is a very useful tool for teachers and administrators to use.  Many teachers create lesson plans together for specific grade level subjects.  Instead of having weekly meetings to discuss new material, they can have constant communication through Google Docs.  This would also help keep things more productive between teachers. Teachers would only be using this tool to collaborate on educational related topics, so it would eliminate any non-school related topics that can be distracting at important meetings.  Overall this seems like a great program to incorporate in all schools.

At the elementary level, I would use this mostly with my student’s parents.  I would be able to send weekly updates in the classroom and parents would be able to leave comments freely about what is going on that week and if they have any questions.  I would also use this to keep track of parent participation.  Parent’s help in the classroom is definitely needed at times with big projects or classroom parties.  This would be a good way to stay organized with plans for activities and other things of that nature.  Google Calendar is also a useful part of Google Docs.  I plan to use this and send the link to my calendar to all of my student’s parents so they know exactly what is going on for the year.  This gives parents a chance plan ahead when students have doctors appointments and other things that would cause them to miss school. Also, in case of illness, students would be able to see exactly what we did each day on Google Calendar by having their parents check my calendar online.