Google Docs

The very first thing that I discovered as I began to explore Google Docs was an outstanding example of its potential. Carol L. Row created a document called Google Historical Voyages and Events in which schools are invited to submit school projects that use Google Tools. The idea is to make excellent local curriculum available to a larger audience. It made me wonder how the teachers at my own school could use that website.

The upshot of this is that this seems to be a way for a person to publish a document online that another person may then edit if that person is listed as a collaborator. It seems to bear some resemblance to a wiki in that respect, but the hierarchical structure is different.

I went into the applications and was quite excited by some of the templates I saw there. They've got resume templates. Earlier this week, I had a reference question from a man who had gone to a website that offered a resume template - but when it came time to print, required him to pay in order for him to get a resume that was not marred with text relating to the website. Google Docs would solve this problem for him and he could work on his resume in more than one sitting without losing his work, having to save it to a disc, or having to pay the website for his own intellectual content. I also found a school calendar that I might be able to use to keep track of my children's progress.

I then tried a few other applications. Google docs has made buying Powerpoint unnecessary. I'm especially impressed with the ability to translate it into any kind of word processing document; many times I have run into problems because I have gotten a document my computer can't open because the format's too old, or it's open source ware and I'm using Word.

One problem. Google Docs makes my work computer freeze.