Classroom Experience with Google Docs

Classroom Experience with Google Docs

 Google Docs is such an incredible tool for college students, offering collaboration, portability, ease of use and widespread acceptance. But there are so many options, both hidden and obvious, that there’s a good chance you’re not using Google Docs to its fullest capability. We’ve discovered 50+ great tips for getting the most out of Google Docs as a student, with awesome ideas and tricks for collaboration, sharing and staying productive.

 

●   Access your documents from anywhere: Whether you’re in your dorm room or the school library, you can access your Google Docs. Take advantage of this to make it easy to do your work on-the-go.

●   Use Docs reference tools: Take advantage of the Define option to use Docs’ built in dictionary, as well as a thesaurus and an encyclopedia available for use right in your document.

●   Go mobile: Google Docs is available on most smart phones and has a number of capabilities available on the go.

●   Save to different file types: You can easily save your documents and spreadsheets to commonly used file types like DOC, XLS, CSV and HTML.

●   Use keyboard shortcuts: With keyboard shortcuts, you can speed through all of your tasks in Google Docs.

●   Use templates: Google Docs has a template gallery for just about anything you can imagine, from an apartment bills organizer to a doc for organizing college visits.

●   Convert PDFs to images and text: Use Google Docs to make PDFs easily editable.

●   Create forms: Gather research information, ask for opinions and more by creating Forms in Google Docs.

●   Search EVERYTHING: Search through pretty much everything you’ve got by searching Docs and Gmail together, thanks to Gmail Labs settings.

●   Autodetect links: Simply add links in Google Docs by having them automatically detected, instead of having to input full URLs.

●   Adding video: You can embed video in documents, slides and more to dress up your presentation.

 Google Docs was used in a face-to-face class for online document creating and editing as well as collaboration, sharing and displaying of documents. The class was conducted in a computer lab where each student had his/her own computer. All students were required to create Google accounts and all assignments were to be shared by everyone in class. Student documents were also made visible to the entire class by having the instructor gain access to the document and displaying it via the instructor’s podium computer and the overhead projection system.