Google Docs

After exploring Google Docs I can say so long to e-mail attachments! I am so excited that we were given the opportunity to explore this application because I don't know that I would have discovered it on my own! There have been so many times throughout my educational career that I have e-mailed an attachment to myself so that I could pick up where I left off on another computer. There have also been times that I have transferred that same document or a presentation to a USB drive so that I could carry it with me wherever I went. Just the other day I sent a portion of a project to a group member and she text messaged me saying she couldn't view the document because of the format...due to the fact that I typed this document on a library computer, and was no longer at the library, I was unable to resend it in a format that was suitable for her computer...thankfully, I sent the document to my e-mail, but my friend's computer would only open my document as "read only." After bouncing around from computer to computer I was quite stressed out and all of this could have been avoided with Google Docs.
Google Docs makes sharing a document so much easier and clearly erases any confusions about updates and versions!! Another benefit is that Google Docs is available from ANY computer ANYwhere in the world at ANY time! How convenient! Google Docs is Internet based, which saves resources and time as well. One drawback that I faced while becoming familiar with Google Docs was saving a document as a PDF...this was a bit stressful because my formatting got a bit messy, which forced me to go through by hand and fix it.
Google Docs can absolutely be incorporated into a classroom and I would highly recommend it. I like the idea of using Google Docs when editing papers...collaborators can edit and save the document online and when one editor makes changes/suggestions they are saved for the other editors to see...your past versions of the document are also saved so you can see your progress and include this in a end of the year portfolio, for example.