Online Collaboration Tools: Thing #9

GoogleDocs has proven useful in recent months as a way to share documents with Media colleagues in my district. The most recent example is a room-by-room inventory of all tech equipment in each school that was compiled by my colleague Terri Osland and then shared with the other Media Specialists for their review. Compiling this inventory is a first step in getting a handle on exactly "what's where" as we try to move forward in a more planful way with technology purchases. Part of Terri's contract is Media at Hopkins High School, and the other part is coordinating technology integration throughout the district, so having a way to easily share documents has been a big help to her and to all of us.

Another interesting use of GoogleDocs in my school has been as a way to have students store documents created at home that they need to open at school. Now that many of our students have a newer version of Microsoft Office on their home computers than the one we use at school, there have been compatibility problems. We try to remind students to save their documents in an earlier version, and we have some computers at school on which they can open them and convert them, and we also tell them about the zamzar.com free conversion site, but sometimes it's easier for students to just use GoogleDocs and avoid having to use any of those other steps, even though they don't need to "share" those documents with anyone but themselves in other settings.

GoogleDocs will be a good way to share my draft of my goals report this spring. Every fall I set several goals for the year (which I communicate to my principals and district-level coordinators), and then in the spring I prepare a report on the progress I made on those goals, along with a bunch of statistical information, of course. I invite my department colleagues to contribute notes to my draft, and rather than e-mailing the document as an attachment, this year I will use GoogleDocs.