The Many Uses of Google Docs

Google Docs is, at first glance, basically an online version of Microsoft Office.  It has the trinity of office apps: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presenter.  If you were to try to compare it as a true apples-to-apples competitor to Office, it would lose out.  Each of the Google Docs online apps has fewer features than its Office counterpart.  It also requires an Internet connection to function, and as a result can get frustrating to use if your connection is not solid.  (As a side note, Microsoft is also making its own version of an online office suite: Office Live)

However, I would argue that Google Docs is actually an orange to Microsoft Office’s apple.  Despite the fact that it lacks all of the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office as an office suite, it’s networked nature makes it a different beast altogether, with many useful advantages that Microsoft doesn’t have.  I want to outline some of those features here, and explain how you might use them as a teacher.

Price and Ease-of-Use

First and foremost, price: Google Docs is free!  All you have to do is sign up for a Google account (if you don’t already have one).  This is especially good for students; you can recommend Google Docs to them if they can’t afford Microsoft Office, or even if they don’t have a computer (they can use Google Docs on the public library or school computers).  Second, you don’t even need to install it on your computer: you just need a web browser.  Third, the lack of features is, to some, actually a blessing in disguise: less features makes it easier to learn and use.

Online Storage

The next big advantage is that any document that you create or edit in Google Docs gets stored online.  You can access your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, from any computer with Internet access.  If you have existing documents, you can upload them to Google Docs, and they will be saved there as well.  If you ever need to have an offline copy, it’s easy to export a copy to your computer.  You can, for example, store your lesson plans in Google Docs, and edit or view them from anywhere.  No more carrying around a thumbdrive with your files on it, or emailing your files to yourself so you can have them at school.

Online Publishing

I use this feature all the time: you can instantly “publish” any of your documents as a webpage to share with your students.  Put your syllabus on Google Docs, publish it as a web page, and then link it on your class website.  Put a Powerpoint presentation on Google Docs, publish it as a webpage, and it students can view it online as a presentation.  The greatest benefit of this is that, once you’ve done this, any change you make to the original document is automatically reflected in the public version.  This is great for fixing mistakes in documents or updating them to reflect changes in your classes from year-to-year.  Instead of having to edit both the document and your website, you just edit the document and you’re done.  Here’s an example of a presentation that I use to introduce one of my projects.

Online Collaboration

This is the real power of Google Docs: you can share and collaborate on documents with your colleagues very easily.  Put your lab stockroom inventory in a spreadsheet and share it with all of the science department.  Any time one person makes an edit to the file, everyone sees the change.  There’s no more need to email documents back and forth with various revisions (Google Docs also keeps track of revision history, who changed what).  Doing a collaborative project with another teacher?  Put your project documents on Google Docs, share them with each other, and you each see the changes that the other made.  You can even make custom web forms to easily enter information into a Google docs spreadsheet.

Do Everything Online

As we know, teachers are not the most highly-paid professionals.  So, getting stuff for free is good.  Teachers also don’t have a lot of time to install and try out every computer program they might need.  So, using stuff you don’t have to set up yourself is even better.  The good: Free programs have been around for a long time, and the Internet has made them easy to get.  The better: In the last few years, a lot of alternatives have been popping up online.  You don’t even have to install them, they run right from your web browser.  This means you can use these on school computers, where the installation of random programs is usually restricted (and you often have to go through a lot of red tape to get something you want installed).  You can also recommend these to students who otherwise would pirate software because they can’t afford it either.  Here are a few suggestions:

Instead of Photoshop

• Sumo Paint.  Sumo Paint looks almost exactly like Photoshop, and requires no sign-up.
• Photoshop Express.  Photoshop Express is also by Adobe, and offers all of the basic photo-fixing features that most users need, including 2Gb of free online storage.

Instead of Word, Excel, Powerpoint

• Google Docs has most of the basic features of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, plus even more, including collaboration.  You can save your docs online, pull them up on any computer, and even publish them as web pages… all for free.  I’m planning on a whole post on Google Docs, but let’s just say it’s awesome for now and leave it at that.

Instead of Inspiration

• Mindmeister.  Mind mapping software Inspiration is awesome, but in addition to being free and install-less, these online versions have one big advantage: online collaboration.
• Mind42.  This is of course the answer to everything (42).

Instead of Adobe Premiere, FinalCut, Movie Maker, iMovie

• JayCut.  Believe it or not, you can even edit and create videos online.  JayCut has all the basics of full video editing.
• Animoto.  Animoto can turn a bunch of photos into a 30-second music video.  Its not a full video editor, but is a cool way to document a school event if you only have pictures.

Instead of a Thumbdrive

• SkyDrive.  Are you always e-mailing your files to yourself just so you can have a copy that you can access from anywhere?  There are now a lot of online storage alternatives.  Microsoft’s own Windows Live SkyDrive allows you to store 25Gb of you files, photos, and etc., online for free.  You can then access them from anywhere and even share them with others.  This is also great for students who don’t have thumbdrives.
• DropBox is super easy to use, but is limited to 2Gb online storage and has an installed utility (for Windows, Mac, and Linux).  I’ll describe DropBox in a future post because it’s just that good.

Instead of Paperbacks

• Project Gutenberg.   Many times in English class, you’re reading the classics, which have long since been out of copyright.  That means they are free, as in free speech.  Project Gutenberg and Google have also made these works free, as in free beer.  You can download electronic copies of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, the Odyssey, and many, many more.  Even if you don’t want to use these to replace physical novels for your students, it saves you the trouble of transcribing or scanning if you want to include a passage on a test or quiz.
• Google Book Search.  Similar to Project Gutenberg, but also allows online viewing directly in your web browser, and has the original scanned pages.

Instead of Textbooks

• Wikibooks, These may not really replace actual textbooks completely, but they do provide great supplemental references that are easily searchable.  You can link topics on a web page and assign it as homework reading, for example.  In addition, some publishers provide online-accessible versions of some of their out-of-print books; check the publisher’s website.
• Wikiversity.  Similar to WikiBooks, but presented in a different manner.