Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Google Docs AHHHH
Ok so Googledocs was hard for me. I found the last Youtube video with the guy who actually walked through Googledocs on his computer the best tutorial for showing how to open a doc, edit a doc, and share the doc with other people. However, none of the tutorials showed how to view the revision history (which I found myself on the file tool bar), and none of the tutorials showed how to publish the doc to the web, or how to download a copy of the document, (which I also figured out from messing around with the technology). Really the hardest part of this module for me was putting the completed resume into my Weeby web page because of size formatting issues, and whenever I uploaded the document to my web page, the tabs and margins in my resume went all crazy. I finally ended up going to class, and having Chris walk me through how to place a public link to my Googledoc resume, because Weebly wasn't going to show the resume in it's correct formatting any other way. I also put a copy of my resume in PDF form on my webpage because Chris mentioned, in class, that PDF form allows the viewer to download the resume with any type of computer without having to worry about compatibility issues. Oh yeah! Another issue I ran into was when I invited all of my housemates to view and edit my Googledoc. One of my housemate Caroline said she could see my doc but could not edit it. We later found that the issue was that she was not logged into her gmail account, which she needed to do before Googledocs would allow her to be able to edit the document. As far as use in the classroom, I do think that Googledocs would be very usable as long as there was, for example, one computer lab hour dedicated to getting every student a Gmail account and a showing all of the students to make their classmates full collaborators in the group's presentation/document. I also think that the teacher should do a survey of the class's home technology equipment to see what students have home computer systems (and what kind) and which do not, so that the teacher is not assigning work that cannot be completed by every group member, because of a lack of access to technology.Lastly, the fact that Googledocs allows the teacher to see the revision history, the teacher could see which student contributed the most, or least. But the instructor should also see that if one student did the lion share because they could work at home while another student could not because of no home computer.
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I like how you used your experience and frustration with learning to use Google Docs to relate it to the school experience and suggesting there is specific lab time set aside to help students become acquainted with Google Docs. This is a good idea and will help make sure no children are left out of the loop!
ReplyDeleteHaha, sorry about that, I didn't realize you had invited me to view your Google doc with my Gmail account, and not my MSU account. I have been running into this problem every so often in this course when trying to sign up for certain sites and collaborate with others in the course. Because my gmail and MSU are linked, this doesn't usually pose a problem, so it was interesting for me to come across this issue in this course (albeit a bit annoying however)
ReplyDeleteI understand some of the complications you had with GoogleDocs. I ran into a few of them, as well. It's good to see that even though you had all of those problems you still were able to work through them and figure out how to use it.
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