Over the past few weeks I have learned how to use the free online
document office service called Google Docs, or Google Drive. Anyone with a Gmail account can create, edit
and store documents online (on the Google cloud) and grant access to anyone
with the direct link to the document or by specifying colleagues email
addresses. I utilized the spreadsheets
and the forms within Google Docs for my instructional technology course.
Google spreadsheet works almost exactly like Microsoft
Excel, with similar intuitive functionality, so it does not take long to get
started creating your own spreadsheet. I
created a sample grade book that I could easily use from any computer by
signing into my Gmail account. The nice
thing about Google Docs is that you no longer have to email attachments back
and forth to yourself or your colleagues when working on a project that
requires multiple revisions. Not only
does this save space in your email inbox and on your computer hard drive, but
it takes the stress and extra organization out of having to keep track of which
file is the most recent. Google Docs
automatically updates and saves your new work so that the next time you open
your document, it is the most recent version.
Kind of neat!
I also explored Google Forms to create an online quiz or
homework assignment. There are multiple ways
of creating questions to suit any need you may require. Once you write your quiz, you simply give
your students the link to the quiz. The
students will then take the quiz online and submit their answers. Flubaroo is an application that works with
Google Forms to grade the quiz and automatically enter the results into a
Google spreadsheet. Once all the results
are in the spreadsheet, it is easy to do statistics on the class spread of
results. The best thing about Google
Forms is the ability to easily create a quiz, homework assignment, or test, and
then have Flubaroo automatically grade them all for you! This will be a huge time saver in the future!
