Google docs

In my classes, I recommend that students utilize "Google Docs" for their collaborative assignments, such as labs and research papers.

Google Docs is a completely free, all online office tool. In addition to doing everything that the most popular office suites do, Google Docs also saves your files online, so you can access them anywhere with an internet connection. You also have the option to share a document with others, so you can have your team members all working on the assignment from their own computers. You can even collaborate in real time, and will be able to see what other people are typing as they type it. This also makes it easy to turn an assignment in to the instructor, especially if the instructor allows students to get their feedback and make changes. No papers to get lost, no changes to type, no saving to flash drives or e-mailing files to yourself, and no "send each part to this team member, and they'll copy and paste each part into one comprehensive, hopefully coherent document".

Google Docs is a great tool for collaboration, helps to avoid assignments that were eaten by dogs, and reduces the number of papers that cross a teachers desk each day.

Go to http://docs.google.com to try it out and see tutorial videos. I've also created a sample lab write-up using Google Docs, which you can view here. The procedure section of my sample lab describes how to get signed up for Google Docs, and some of the things you can do with it.

As I have time, I'll be adding tutorials to this site that show how I use Google Docs in my classroom.

*Note: I am not affiliated with Google except as a user of their products. I do not receive any benefit, monetary or otherwise, for promoting Google.

Tutorial Videos

Video 1 - The basics (Google docs home screen, creating a document, sharing, saving) (download video - 10 MB)