online-office

=Online Office =

These are websites that can be used instead of software applications like Microsoft's Office or Apple's iWork. Usually, you can find word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations online which allows you and your students to have access to the same document anywhere. Another added benefit of these web applications is that sharing and editing of documents is provided to allow students and teachers to easily collaborate together.

Google Docs
Web 2.0 is all about creating and collaborating information not just reading it with a single source of information. Google Docs is one way to achieve this. It allows students to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images, and forms and easily share them with other students. They can then work collaboratively, in real-time on a project or paper. No more excuses of leaving their paper at home, as they would have access to their work anywhere with Internet. Many schools have done away with iWork and Office and just use Google Docs.

Cons ** Classroom Ideas **
 * Pros **
 * It's free
 * Instead of losing track the location of documents, documents can be stored it in a central place and access it from any computer
 * Up to ten users can edit a word processing document or presentation simultaneously, and each user will see the changes made by other users almost instantly
 * Up to two hundred people can view a document simultaneously
 * Automatically saves revisions (can save hundreds of them), so you can revert back to an old version easily
 * Promotes cooperation between students and peer editing skills
 * Promotes group collaboration and creativity by having students record their group projects together in a single doc
 * Even children from different classes can collaborate together
 * Using 1 of 300 templates, users can easily create custom documents like albums, flipbooks, cards, calendars, schedules, certificates, labels, business cards, letters, faxes, resumes
 * Have students to turn in essays using Google Docs, so it's faster, facilitates teacher comments, and helps monitor students progress
 * Enables teachers and students to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations that can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes
 * Teachers can read and proofread a student's work. Then the student can go back and revise their work, and keep track of their progress without printing a page of paper.
 * Saves paper
 * Be sure all users know the features it has available since it does not have all the features of Microsoft Word
 * Very minimal layout and design features. Users can't "jazz up" their document with many graphics, fonts, and/or special layouts. Expect to create fairly "bland" documents
 * File size limited to 500kb for word processing documents, 1MB for spreadsheets, and 10MB for presentations
 * Internet down = No access to documents
 * Whoever you invite to see your document (collaborate on it), has to have a Google account
 * Students will need guidelines and checklists to follow when editing since this can be a very sensitive project for some students
 * Importing and exporting files is limited to only a few formats
 * Any type of collaborative creative content will involved “creative differences”, teacher needs a management tools promote cooperative effort
 * Documents could be accessed by those not given access
 * Have the teachers in your grade level contribute to a document about cutting across the curriculum for a grade-wide project that involves all subject areas
 * Students can read the same book and write a book report
 * Share reflections of a field trip
 * Create a story from a story prompt
 * Recreate a historical event
 * Develop a math word problem
 * Create articles for the school newspaper
 * Write a script for a play
 * Teachers can sent out a survey or a quiz for students to complete, with the results directly going into spreadsheet for easy data collection

Here is a Common Craft video explaining more about what is Google Docs.
 * Examples **

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