Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Week 5 Exploration

Create A Graph
I explored Create A Graph after reading others posts about it. The learning curve seems very small. This could really help with analyzing data. LoggerPro is typically used in our school district, but I found this to have a steep learning curve. I didn’t fully understand and the kids struggled with it as well. I think this is a great alternative, and I plan on using it this year.

GoogleDocs
I’ve heard things about GoogleDocs before, but I’ve never spent any time looking at it. I just completed the second day of our Tech Symposium at my school district. We spent some time working with GoogleDocs, and I see a lot of applications to it. One of the biggest benefits of GoogleDocs is that it allows students to collaborate on documents in real time. For example, students can upload a Word document to GoogleDocs. At home, members of the group can be working at their respective locations on the same document at the same time. This feature can be used for presentations, Word, and spreadsheets. Another great feature of GoogleDocs is the ability to create forms for your class. Using GoogleDocs, you can create surveys and worksheets that can be completed by the students anywhere. The information is placed neatly into a spreadsheet for the teacher. This could be very helpful when trying to reduce the amount of paper being used in the classroom. Instead of completing an opening day survey, the students can finish a GoogleDocs form. Students could complete homework worksheets using GoogleDocs. I’m also contemplating using these forms as exit tickets in class. I think this tool has a lot of applications.

Let me know what you think about my analysis of these tools. Do you use these any differently?

2 comments:

  1. I really like your analysis of GoogleDocs. I've been meaning to spend some time with it as well and now I know I've got to do it. I am curious though, how do students merge their different versions of the same document that they are all working on? Are they all separate documents once they've worked on them, or how do they know the changes that have been made? These are some of the questions I'll be looking for the answers to when I go exploring. :) Thanks for the GoogleDocs insight.

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  2. Thanks for the comment Carol. After your comment, I took my laptop and desktop and tested it out. It works like magic. When two people are working on the document it tells you who all is viewing it. You can all send messages to each other. This way, one student could ask "does this change looks good or not?" When one user makes a change it shows up almost instantly on the other computer. I'm even more impressed with GoogleDocs after this.

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