The experience of creating a document in Google Documents

Creating a shared document was a great deal easier than I would have imagined.  In the very first Dr. Krug mentioned the ability of Google Documents to share between users as well as examine versions.  After hearing him talk about this I immediately shared this with other teachers at my school and we tried this out for ourselves.  Without any guidance or instructions we were able to figure out how this works and actually create a shared document.  This was done in the space of an lunch period.  This is a testimony of the user friendliness of the program.  My time in class on Thursday working with my lab partner did nothing to change this opinion, instead it just reinforced that feeling. 

Also the comment and view functions seem to be tailor made for a school.  The students who are collaborating together would all have the right and ability of editing the document.  The teacher could comment on the document, but not actually change the student's work, and the other students in the class could be given the ablity to view the document without making comments. 

It was very exciting to see what would happen if two or more people were working on the document at the same time.  With the different colors employed, it looked like a chat in real time.  Therefore each student could see what the other student was writing as it was being written and could comment on this. 

We didn't try this, but I will need to check and see if one student can interfere with another student as they are writing.  If so this could be a problem, but it did not seem possible.