Two Birds. One Stone.

The subject of today’s blog is Google Document and it is brought to you by……well, if I am being completely honest, it is a beautiful grey day outside and I have a couch calling my name so, today’s blog is brought to you by “other things to do or not do”. Let’s jump right in shall we? I have quite a large list of things to do for work over the weekend, not one of them is something I wish to devote my weekend time to so I decided to kill two birds with one stone so to speak. We started a 1:1 initiative this year at DRFS. In order to make the laptop initiative more than just one more thing teachers had to do, we tried to find ways to add value and subtract chaos. The campus services approximately 800 students. (You can make up your own mind whether that is a large or small population of students.) The school does not have wireless printers and the district has a limited number of technicians so students are not connected to classroom printers. And even if they were, there was really no provision for managing that much printing traffic on outdated and small capacity printers. Plus, there are no additional funds for printer paper.

In an effort to address the preexisting road blocks, I started thinking about collaboration. How do we collaborate in a digital world? Many meetings and trainings happen via email and trainings are now webinars. How could that kind of technology be harnessed for education? Enter the cloud. What if teachers and students could “work and communicate” on a digital level in the cloud?  I was already using DropBox with my colleagues but didn’t feel like it would be enough space or functionality for what teachers and students would need. So, I started researching Google Drive: more free storage, email, and a ton of apps that could be used to improve student achievement, engagement and bring our classrooms into the 21^st Century.

So now that you have the back story let’s get back to the two birds with one stone – I promised teachers that I would create a one page document for them to share with their students on how to set up Google Drive. (We got the student email addresses late in the laptop check out process so I was unable to get all the students up and running before they went to class with their laptops.) I fired up my laptop this morning to blog and work on that to-do list. Then it hit me. Rather than fire up Word to create my “one-pager”, why not create it as a Google Doc and then blog about that? So that is what I did.

I opened my Google Drive. I clicked on the red CREATE button in the left hand navigation menu and poof! A blank document opened up. I was able to type and do basic formatting. I didn’t get all crazy and add a page border. I added a header. I only do that when page space is limited. (I have been accused of using too many words so I am trying to keep all instructions to one page – at work J) I inserted some images and poof! My work was done with no more effort than creating a document in Microsoft Word. One thing that I did find a little confusing is that there is not a SAVE command or choice on the File menu. Google automatically saves your document to your drive. Thank you, Google.

When inserting a graphic, you actually have to click a button on the pop-up screen to upload the picture from your computer. The process isn’t all that different from inserting a picture and browsing for it using a program that is not web-based. But if you aren’t familiar with the term “upload”, it may throw you for a loop. Once you are finished with your document, you can share it with other people or it can just sit in your Drive until you are ready to do something else with it. You can select how to download it – Word file or even PDF. The functionality of Google Document is very similar to Microsoft Office. I doubt a novice Office user would notice any difference in the Google Document application.

The silver lining to this cloud-based application is that if you are purchasing a computer and do not or cannot spend the extra on the Microsoft Office bundle, you can take advantage of Google’s free web base application.

 

There it is!!! One of today’s birds J