In my opinion, no single piece of web 2.0 technology has had the impact on the education world as the Google suite of products, particularly Google Docs. Google has revolutionized the world of software by taking on one of the largest, most widespread, and most engrained pieces of software, Microsoft Office. While other forms of open source software have been in existence, they all required downloads, installation, and often compatibility issues when trying to transfer documents between them and Office. Google Docs took the entire experience into the cloud. No more installations, no more updates, no more compatibility issues, these were all huge positives for Google’s product, and in the words of the TV telemarketer…there’s more! In bringing documents into the cloud, they also revolutionized how people can collaborate on documents.
I first experimented with Google Docs in the spring/ summer of 2008. As a technology trainer for our school, I taught a full day workshop on Google Docs to a group of teachers from our school and from neighboring schools. Teachers really were taken by the ability for multiple students to be working on a document at the same time, but not in the same place. Others also loved the ease of which the document, presentation, or spreadsheet could be converted into and out of Office. The feature allowing students to share without a gmail.com account even helped get over the hurdle of using in schools where gmail is usually not available to kids.
For myself, my favorite use of Google Docs as a teacher was with the presentation portion of the suite. While students working on a document simultaneously could interfere with each other, the nature of a presentation with its multiple slides, was ideal for students to work simultaneously on the same presentation. Previous to Google Docs I had students creating and saving slides in different presentations and then trying to pull them all together through cutting and pasting after passing through shared folders on our network.
I was excited to learn on Tuesday about the Google Forms. This was not available when I had previously been working with Google Docs. My mind has been racing with different thoughts on how to use this exciting tool. I already was able to create a form that I’m using to gather feedback on the trainings my technology trainers are currently offering. In my job as principal/technology director, gathering feedback from staff, students, and parents has always been something I want to do and this gives me a great way to do that.
Google Sites was the other tool we spent time learning on Tuesday. I had very limited experience with that tool, but have done an extensive amount of web design. One of my first challenges when I changed roles at the school was the transition from our Dreamweaver based web site, to a much more user friendly site using CMS4Schools, a product sold by CESA 6. Dreamweaver requires a high level of technical skill, knowledge of writing html code, and a complex folder structure, and was not easy for your average person to use without extensive training. The CMS product is designed to be very user friendly. Google Sites reminds me a lot of CMS, as it is pretty easy to learn. In a short time you could use Sites to set up a fairly professional website. While Sites would be great for an individual teacher to use if his or her school did not have CMS or a similar product, it would be very difficult to design and manage an entire site with the depth and complexity of a website for an entire school district using this program. I do however appreciate the advancements Sites offers as it keeps pressure on our provider to continue to add features to keep up.
This pressure on others software developers is probably one of the best outcomes of Google’s efforts. Microsoft now offers far more collaboration and mobility in its software at a far cheaper price, email providers all offer web-based access meaning anywhere/anytime access, and the above mentioned improvements to our web design software are just a few examples. The other key that separates Google from the rest is there is little to no risk of it disappearing (always a worry with web based, free software). Google has entered into almost every area of Web 2.0, particularly now that they are stepping up to offer a social networking feature comparable to Facebook. It’s been interesting watching Google drive so much of the current field in terms of software and it will be interesting to see how this continues into the always uncertain future.
