Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

One idea I came up with for a collaborative use of Google Docs was to use it for editing, updating and correcting our Schemes of Work for teaching. These are documents that summarise the day-by-day learning objectives for each course, along with key vocabulary terms, links to useful resources or websites etc. Each year, the group of teachers who will be teaching the subject each take their own copy of the Scheme of Work and use it, hopefully adding to it and editing, correcting or updating it as they go along. The idea was that all these changes were then incorporated into a new, improved version for use during the next year. But, this final step has rarely happened. Even if it did, it meant trawling through the document and trying to find the changes.

It would be much better to have the Scheme of Work in a Google Doc form, where each teacher could just edit the same online version as they went along. Then all the changes would be incorporated into one document and the revisions would be easier to track.

The same idea goes for notes from meetings etc. We had a meeting after school today where we discussed topics in groups and then shared, briefly, our findings. The problem is, is that there was no way for everyone to go through all the discussions from all other groups, so we probably missed out on a lot of useful information. It might be more useful to have a Google Doc version of the meeting notes, where someone from each group could add their group’s contributions to the discussion and have all the information in one place, far all to see.

Also today, some of my students were doing presentations. A couple of niggles – getting all the presentations onto the one computer for using the projector seemed to take an inordinately long time and there was quite a degree of overlap between some of the topics, which led to repetition during the talks. It may be possible to get them to do all the talks in one Google Doc presentation. That way, they could have all the presentations back-to-back in one document, and also be able to see what others have written and so avoid overlaps.

A couple of the blogs from my reader have been talking about the use of resources such as Google Docs:

Sharing documents with others via the web using Google Docs

Get.Off.Paper