Google docs and spreadsheets

Well - yesterday at school I got a huge shock.


No longer will schools purchase Microsoft word, excel etc for their students to use because the students do not use these often enough to justify the expense. (To clarify, teachers would still have access, just not students)


Well at first I was mind boggled over what on earth we would use... however very quickly I was informed of these FREE online sites that provide you with similar attributes to Microsoft's software.


Google docs and spreadsheets - is the place to go. I have been playing around on it today and it is pretty good.


Good points:

• easy navigation
• works the same way just about as Microsoft Word - so I didn't have to learn anything new
• It is very simple - not too many gadgets to be confused with
• I can publish a document and make it available for anyone to see - and of course every time you edit it, you do not have to upload it again. It already makes the changes when you save. This is awesome for me as a teacher who uploads documents for students to access from our website, and then finds there is a mistake in the document. This time instead of opening, saving, and uploading again; I simply edited and saved. The document changes it self!! YAAAA (from a teacher who always grammar and spelling errors - despite the dictionary etc)
• You can access your documents from anywhere - and you do not have to worry about whether you are on a Mac of a Microsoft version of anything.
• You can save the documents as Microsoft word or Mac equivalent, and have them on your hard drive or email them etc
• Very easy spreadsheet navigation
• Good simple graph maker
• Can do formulas - not sure to what extent though - I haven't got too technical with it yet
• You can post your document to your blog (which I am hoping to achieve with this blog - yes successful after a few attempts)
• You can save your graph straight to your documents on you hard drive, which stops all the fluffing around with cutting and pasting into paint. Like this one...

• It has an autosave option
• Students can access school work from home without having to have a school intranet with passwords
• You can add collaborators so many people can work on a document.
• You can upload documents from your hard drive
  

Down sides

• Limited features (although, realistically for kids to use, I think it has most of what it needs)
• Limited amount of storage space (but it is free)
• not sure about exporting the document to an online storage facility - I have not looked into this yet. (this could overcome the storage space dilemma)
• Limited size restrictions to documents. Just make sure you limit the amount of pictures and what not (500K - with images counted as something else - sorry I am not technical enough yet to explain this, check out there FAQS, it is one of the top 5).
• Spreadsheet has limited graph functions - no lines of best fit, colour changes, changing the width of bars etc. As a Geographer, I would like my kids to be able to use these sorts of features
• Need to become a google member - this really is not a down side at all - they have got some awesome stuff now including Gmail and blogging, calendars.... gadgets for web pages etc

So postives outweigh the negatives I think.

I will still be using the software on my hard drive, unless I am wanting to put my word document on my website - then I will use google.

As for my students, I will get them to use this to do work on, I think I will do alot of it on this, especially when they are blogging - it might reduce the amount of errors????

See what you think! :)