(My apologies to any MILI participants who know this already, but I want to share some of what we’ve done concerning collaboration with the 23ThingsOnAStick participants.)
I would describe GoogleDocs as the most “life-changing” tool for me . . . and I think I could venture to say for the school librarians we work with in the Metronet Information Literacy Initiative. Since I use a lot of different computers, I’ve always has headaches with losing my flash drive . . . or having it not being compatible with the computer I’m using . . . or emailing myself documents when I don’t have a flash drive and will be working on a different computer later . . . or saving something on a hard drive thinking I’d be back at that computer, but end up working somewhere else . . . on and on. And this happens to a lot of school students, too, as school librarians can attest when they are trying to help students print something right before their class. In fact, I’ll share a post from a school librarian who is thinking about beginning a school-wide initiative for all students to use GoogleDocs.
Anyway, now with GoogleDocs, I have everything with me all the time everywhere. I love it. And that is not even taking into account the collaboration capabilities, which are amazing. Some of my favorite things are that docs can be published as web pages, that you can compare changes between different revisions, and that multiple people can collaborate on one page at once — in the slide show and spreadsheet applications, it can be 50 people at once! (I think it is only 10 for the regular docs.)
So, in short, this has made my life a lot easier. I think that if I were in a more traditional work setting, I’d try to ask myself before most emails, “Could this be accomplished more efficiently with GoogleDocs?”
Google docs has most certainly been life-changing. And I’m of the mind that all of our students here at our high school should know how to use it, because it would level the playing field. Like you, I see kids every day trying to print off papers at the last minute, without luck, for various reasons. And it breaks my heart when I know they’ve done their work but can’t hand it in, for lack of access. That’s the thing about docs, it’s accessible from everywhere.