Google Apps Project for CPED 5005

Google documents have forced teachers and all educators to come face to face with a two different realities in students of today.  The first of reality that is faced by all parents and teachers both is that unlike students of the past, young people today are very mobile.  Gone are the days that you can expect students go home and work on a paper for hours at a time.  With that change in schedule is a change in the period of time that a student will have working on a single computer. (I myself have already sit down in front of 5 different computers or workstations as I have considered this document.)  Google apps successfully deals with this issue.  Anywhere that students have access to the web, they have access to their projects.  Also with any tool that they can edit or create a paper, I can foresee students using this tool with their smartphones.

Another reality that Google Documents faces is the concept of communication.  It seems very fitting that in a day and age where students do not feel the need to communicate face to face, with Google documents they do not need to collaborate face to face.  Google apps more than meets the Common Core standard of collaboration, because it forces the students to collaborate through a project.  As well as the Common Core instructions of sharing the document with a teacher, as well as parents or peers, and receiving feedback.  Google Documents allows a student to complete all of this within the framework of one document.   With this tool it is foreseeable that students will be able to work together to deliver a single paper, even though the students are at different schools, or in different countries.  

As to be expected there are drawbacks with everything, and there are with Google Documents.  First of all as a Word Processing program it does not meet the standards set my Microsoft Word, or Wordperfect, to other programs that I have experience using.  This downfall is not evident when simply keying in an essay, instead it is clear in many other aspects.  First of all when looking at the Tool Bar there are many functions that I was unable to find.  Things such as the Subscript and Superscript functions are absent.  I did enjoy the equation editor function.  Again it is not as powerful as Microsoft’s but it was a lot easier to access. Another weakness I consider is that Google Documents has to rely on the Internet to access, which is obviously difficult for the ones who do not have Internet access.

Other than these though I was fairly satisfied the functions were there, they may be fewer choices, but they were there.  For instance when it came to inserting a page number, Microsoft Word gives levels of choices; top or bottom; right, middle or left.  Google Documents only gives you top or bottom.

Definitely the good outweighs the bad, as I have already shown this function to several teachers at work and creating and sharing a document was much, much easier than I expected.  Also the ability to review the history of the document was a tremendous help. At this time the common Core Standard only mentions limits the importance of sharing the information within the confines of a class or a family.  With Google Documents it is easy to imagine a time when the Common Core Standards will require a student to collaborate within the world-wide classroom.

Jeff Evans