You Had Me at Share

Google Docs is my FAVORITE Web 2.0 tool!  Why? Because it can be SHARED!  Sharing takes Google Docs to a whole new level.  No longer are we isolated in our work.   Google Docs frees us from the shackles of word processing like Dr. Martin Luther King empowered a nation of people to become free. Google is moving us forward into a collaborative, cooperative, team centered environment whether we like it or not.  It is just up to us to get our heads around it and use the tools to make our workflow simpler, more powerful, and collaborative.

Sharing documents is revolutionizing workflow for administrators, teachers, and students.  The share feature allows documents to be shared between people in a variety of ways.  The best way for the workflow to happen is to leverage share feature in collections.  Collections not only allow work to be organized or grouped but the collections can also be shared just like a doc, spreadsheet, or presentation. 

For example, a teacher creates two collections and calls one Student Work View Only and the other collection Student Work Handed In.  The teacher shares both folders with all students and sets the sharing settings to view.  From this point forward, the teacher creates docs and spreadsheets and simply drags files into the Student Work View Only folder.  It is so SIMPLE to share it with a group of students.  Google Docs make it as easy to share a folder with students as answering the phone.  Students have access to view all documents in the collection.  For students to utilize a document, they simply open the doc and click File>Make a Copy.  This places a copy of the doc in their Google Docs Home Directory and they can edit it as needed.

Start using the power of Google Docs today! What are you waiting for?

-Ann Feldmann