#15. Google Documents for education.

www.google.com/educators/

Google Docs really provides teachers and students with a collaborative word processor and spreadsheet and web site builder. Writing, storing, sharing and presenting will never be the same again.

Its a free utility and one of its best tools is the form tool that enables you to create forms that are posted on the web. As students enter in their data, it appears immediately on a shared class or teacher spreadsheet. The presentation tool has a nice chat feature built in too.

Its other great strength is its ability to connect students with collaborative writing projects. Google Docs allows the students to work together around their busy schedules. There are a variety of output formats, and Google stores the material on its servers so anyone can access at any time. All this means accessibility is not an issue.

Its really like a simple wiki for sharing the development of docs and works, which makes it a great way to create a channel of communication between teacher and student between classes. Useful for writing assignments and feedback between classes.

As one teachers says … “I can’t image going back to the days of e-mailing draft documents within a group. Google Docs is the application I use when I need to collaborate on any writing project with a group.”