Google Docs

Google Docs is a free program that allows you to share and create word documents, spreadsheets and presentations collaboratively online. It is similar to creating a wiki.

In the past, creating collaborative documents with others involved sending thousands of messy email attachments back and forth for people to edit. Google Docs now lets you attach an email to a document rather than the conventional way of attaching a document to email. Google Docs allows you to turn offline documents into online documents.

You can invite up to 200 people to view a particular document and up to 10 people can be online editing the document at the same time!

In the classroom Google Docs can be used to:
-Promote group collaboration
-Facilitate writing as a process
-Monitor students work in progress
-Comment and aid students with their work as they go
-Share findings of experiments, class thoughts and discussions on topics and so on with other local, state, national and international schools
-Keep an online record keeping system that is accessible anywhere anytime,
-and much more!
An added bonus of this program is that it is free from viruses and you eliminate the risk having a program which will 'crash' due to an overload of information.

Google Docs is definitely the way to go as far as creating collaborative documents go. It is simple to use and available to anyone, and if you get stuck their website (which is almost the size of another world wide web!) will have ALL the answers!

An issue I am concerned with which arose in the class presentation (not by fault of the presenters themselves) was the fact that documents can become very hard to keep track of and edit when there are several people editing the same document at once. For instance, lines that I wrote were being 'edited' seconds after I had published them. This could become a huge problem not only in the classroom but also in the workplace. Being able to edit/update documents this quickly means that other team members could miss out on reading and evaluating what a particular individual wrote all because one person did not like what they read so they 'edited' that part of the document. Google Docs does however does keep a record of the document each time it is updated, so you can look back at what the document looked like before it was edited last.

Check out this awesome video which explains the benefits of using Google Docs over emails!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIgHmjKymlU