Sunday 28 February 2016

Week 7- Google Docs is a student’s best friend

Once again, I was very excited to see the focus of this week’s lesson was on the Google Docs collaboration tool! We are currently in the process of creating an online presentation with a few of our classmates and although my group members and I all go to the same school, we must use Google docs to create the presentation completely online instead of meeting in person.

I personally have become a huge fan of Google Docs over my university career… mostly within the past couple of years when I really started having to complete group papers and presentations, so I strongly believe that the educational benefits from this tool are huge. Just off the top of my head, some of its greatest benefits are the team’s ability to share ONE link and work in ONE document instead of constantly sharing revised Word files, the ability to make ‘suggestions’ to the document’s content instead of making outright changes (this is similar to the ‘track changes’ function in Word), the ability to download the final online copy into a Word document or a PDF and the ability to see all revisions and re-add something that was deleted instead of creating, typing, or searching for it again!

Just a quick story about my last point; last semester I had a massive group paper due for a class and I had spent hours editing our paper on Google docs. After I was done, I closed the document and went back to it a little bit later and all of my changes were missing (imagine my reaction as Google Docs is supposed to save changes automatically  which it normally does). I quickly discovered that all document changes are tracked and I could easily re-add all of my changes to the document through just a few clicks… crisis averted!

Due to my obvious love for Google Docs, this tool was part of my ‘create’ section of my PLE from week 2, since it’s a tool that I have previously found to be quite helpful prior to this class. I will admit that the full versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint do have some extra features that Google’s online versions do not, however I find one way to solve for this is to get the document as close to done as possible online and then download it into Word or whichever program, make your few minor changes and there you go!

A great video that our professor shared with us this week to watch is an introduction to Google Docs by Stacey Huffine, which can be found here. For someone who has spent quite a bit of time playing around with Google Docs, even I learned a thing or two from the video!

My many uses of Google Docs!
Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016. 
My many uses of Google Docs!
Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016. 





























This week’s interesting Feedly find…
This week I read an article on my Twitter feed about how the game show Jeopardy (which I admittedly watch fairly often) will no longer be allowing Canadian contestants on the show – which I found ironic given that the show’s host, Alex Trebek, is Canadian! When searching through Feedly, I found an article about how a Goodman School of Business professor (and Jeopardy champion) is also disappointed in this new restriction. Check out Professor Dolansky’s comments here.

2 comments:

  1. Hey Carolyne!

    I too have been a huge fan of using Google Docs! I have been using it frequently for group projects as well in my university career; it's a great and easy tool to use for group projects. I have never had any issues with Google Docs so far and I am glad to see you could recover your information so easily. I did not know you could do that, thanks for sharing!

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  2. Hey Carolyne,

    I really enjoyed reading your post this week and I agreed with a lot of your points about the advantages to using Google Docs. Like yourself, I have become a huge advocate of Google Docs during my university career as it has helped me finish many group assignments on time.
    Also I thought the news article you picked about Jeopardy was very interesting and shocking that Canadians are no longer able to compete on the famous game show!

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