Google Apps Rocks my Socks

The google apps are an awesome set of tools for collaboration. I use all of them and love how they all work together. We use google docs to take notes on meetings. The ability to have more than one person take notes and see their edits in real time is a real
 plus. We can then share the notes from the meeting with the rest of the faculty with a couple of clicks. This document is now “live” meaning if we make changes the same URL will get teachers to updated meeting notes.
   
    Google calendars are especially useful because you can embed them into wikis and your teacher website. This allows you to make changes in your calendar and have them automatically updated on your website or wiki. You can also attach documents to calendar events so you could use google calendar as a syllabus. I have used tons of other calendar programs but the ability to embed the calendar and the “quick add feature” has sold me on google calendar.

    I also really like google presentations because they allow you to make your website or wiki more dynamic. A page does not have to be static. If you embed a presentation in your website the student can go through it at their own pace. Recently, I taught a workshop and I used several google presentations to show a step-by-step process. The great thing was I didn’t have to do any of the work! An Internet friend of mine had already done the how to presentations, I just copied the embed code into my website (with her permission). Imagine if all teachers did this, we could save ourselves a lot of work.

    Finally, I just wanted to let everyone know that there is also a super google spreadsheet app. What I really like about the spreadsheet is the “forms”. Forms allow you to send forms out to anyone with an email address. So you can send students, parents, and faculty questionaires and get all the results in a spreadsheet. You can also embed the form into your website or wiki, pretty cool.