Room With A View

Several weeks back Google announced job cuts and cuts to some of its on-line apps. Among others it announced that Google Notebook will no longer accept new users and Google Video will no longer accept user-uploaded content. I use Google Notebook with my classes.

I’m not surprised it’s getting shut down. Of all the apps I use with students and teachers it’s the least understood. Many people are happy just to make their notes in Google Docs. Though Docs and Notebooks are similar I like the ability to right click on content and have it saved to a notebook. Regardless of how one feels about Google Notebook it points out the potential downside of cloud computing.

Cloud computing put users at the mercy of others. Other than more traditional websites that schools control, cloud based sites can be shuttered quickly and with no guaranteed input from users.

I find the concept of cloud computing very attractive. Someone else has to worry about the cost of storage and data backup. Also, it makes client software support easy because it’s browser based. But as attractive as I find it, the fact that someone else controls accessibility makes it not a viable option for schools as a primary solution. Anyone who suggests otherwise has their head in the clouds

Stinto looks like an interesting tool. It’s a quick easy way to set up a chat room. No email addresses or passwords are necessary for users. The whole thing disappears after a short period of inactivity. It might be useful in classroom situations when a teacher needs a quick and short term chat solution. It could be easily set up on the spur of the moment.

An article in the NY Times asks this question and points to the difficulties in having so many web services. There’s only so much time in a day.

As a tech coordinator, I’m very careful when recommending sites or tools to teachers. They’re busy. I see my role as doing some of the leg work–finding worthwhile tools and helping them see ways to apply them to their teaching.

Google recently released an on-line software package called Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It is, as the name suggests an on-line word processor and spreadsheet program. I’m not sure where the Spreadsheet part came from but the Docs part—the word processor–was formerly called Writely. Google bought Writely, to much fanfare, several months ago.

I’ve had a Writely account for some time but when I first tried it, I didn’t really get it. The interface was easy enough but I didn’t see the point in an on-line word processor. Microsoft Word is available on all the machines on which I work. When I tried Writely I didn’t like writing in a web browser. It felt a bit clunky. I had tried other on-line word processors and felt the same way about them. Regardless of my early experiences, when Google announced its Docs and Spreadsheets program (a revised Writely) I decided I’d give it a try. That’s when I saw it’s potential.

To me the potential is not in the word processor per se but rather, in it’s collaboration feature. It has the collaboration benefits of a wiki with the editing/layout features of a word processor. Docs gives several people access to the same document. People can edit the document simultaneously or at different times. Here’s one teaching situation where Docs and Spreadsheets may help.

As a teacher my class often does group work. Problems come at the end of a class when students are not finished an assignment. If it was an individual assignment, I’d just assign the task to be finished for homework but how do I fairly assign a group writing assignment for homework? I can’t—until now. With Google Docs and Spreadsheets one student can post the work to Google Docs, invite the other group members to collaborate and they can easily finish the task later–working individually or simultaneously. Because of the features built into the program they can even see who in the group is pulling his/her weight and who is not. If teachers are given access to the document, they can see a complete history of the work—a handy assessment feature.

Docs has a lot of potential for group writing tasks among teachers too. Curriculum documents or common assessments can be collaboratively revised using Docs and Spreadsheets much more easily than using track changes in Word.

I don’t see myself switching to Google Docs and Spreadsheets as my main word processor but for tasks when I need to collaborate with others, it will come in handy.

I remember a few years ago someone told me there was no point in teaching keyboarding because voice recognition software would make the skill obsolete. Perhaps this will be the case in the future but right now my students need to be able to keyboard. They need to get to the point where they can get a first draft on the computer without their lack of keyboarding skills getting in the way of their ideas.

I mentioned this at my school’s back to school night earlier this week and the parents asked for software recommendations. The networked program we use at school is not available in Beijing. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good keyboarding program? Is Mavis Beacon still widely used?

The folks on the Seedlings Podcast were talking about Google Notebook so I installed it yesterday and have been playing around with it. It’s an extension for Firefox and Internet Explore that let’s a person copy and paste text from a webpage into their Google Notebook without leaving the page. (No extension for Safari at this point.) It has huge potential for kids doing research. They can be working at home, at school, or a friend’s house and still have access to their notes.

Of course plagiarism and making sure that kids write things in their own words are issues but they have been for a while. (People have been pasting text into word-processors for years.) It looks pretty good.

My school is moving towards using Microsoft’s Learning Gateway but it looks like it will be a while before teachers can post their course material on-line. I was really encouraged when a couple of teachers asked me to help them set up a webpage for their joint classes. When I asked about Learning Gateway the IT folks told me it would be a year or two before teachers will be using Learning Gateway. We can’t wait that long and nor do we have to.

Wikispaces will foot the bill nicely. It is easy to use and has rss built in.