The rationale for Google Docs in school.

I found this interesting article from another teacher who is using Google Docs with his classes. Both the students, who work in groups as well as the student and teacher, use Google Docs to enhance the learning process. Here is the article in full.

I've noticed a growing trend in my classroom over the last few months. More and more kids are moving over to using Google docs and their blogs as a place to complete their written assignments.

I don't usually care where kids work. When they are on the computers we have access to, they used to most often use Word and then email things back and forth to home every night so that they could continue working. This was more difficult if they didn't have Word at home. It invovled a process of cutting and pasting and fixing formatting errors each time they did this.

But over the last few months, I've noticed the kids in my class have made a dramatic move to Google docs. Using Google docs they can work at school or at home much more easily. But they are moving there for other reasons as well, the biggest one being that they can simply share their work with me and with other kids in the class. For example, my students are currently writing a short, one page essay on a topic of their choice to do with life in ancient Egypt. They've chosen a wide variety of topics ranging from the Nile to make - up and dress, boats, farming techniques, and much more. I keep the formal essays that they need to write short, being much more interested in having students learn to write a set of coherent paragraphs and an interesting introduction and conclusion than I am in quantity. It's not hard to write lots. It's hard to write well.

But with these pieces, these students are more often sharing them with me so that I can help them with revisions and specific paragraphs. They will share their document with me so that I can write suggestions and ideas for them and then save them for them. The same is true among each other. As students have been working on topics that may occasionally overlap ("What kind of clothing did the farmers wear?") students are sharing their pieces with each other. I don't consider this to be wrong or plagarism of any sort. I consider this to be knowledge networking and making use of the resources n the classroom. It's called learning from each other.

So they are learning the benefits of these types of social, online software. I gives many of them access to the same platforms and it allows the knowledge to flow more easily around the classroom.