Teachers shared their projects and ideas

Back in September we asked teachers to send us some examples of how they used Docs in their classrooms. Teachers are some of our most avid Docs users, so I knew we would see some pretty creative ideas.

Once again, I was impressed by our teachers' creativity, ingenuity and ability to use Docs to solve every day challenges. The submissions we received ranged from forms that students use to provide peer feedback for group work or write a book review for their class to spreadsheets used to conduct science experiments. Some teachers, like Sallie Hill, even used Docs and Google Sites to run a history project with students around the world. Now that's what I call collaboration!

To see some of the best of the ideas that were submitted, check out our Docs for Teachers page. Thanks to all of you for sharing your ideas and your work. We look forward to seeing what else you come up with.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Docs User Operations

Access Google Docs from your Desktop

If you often work with Google Docs, you probably want more ways to access your docs quickly. A recent example is the handy Docs gadget in Gmail that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs right from within Gmail. Today, we'd like to introduce a desktop-based, better looking cousin.

The Google Desktop team is pleased to release a Google Docs Gadget for Google Desktop. It allows you to search and open your Google documents right from your desktop. And as an added bonus, we've included drag-and-drop uploading for documents.

We all use Google Docs here at work, which shouldn't surprise anyone. Speaking personally (though with a slight bias), we think Google Docs works well in a fast-paced work environment because you can create and share documents freely without worrying about saving them to your machine, passing around email attachments, and of course, finding them later. However, there are times when we just need to bring up the same few documents continually throughout the day. Some examples are a data entry spreadsheet, a technical manual, or that steamy romance novel you've been secretly penning during work hours. You can instead bring up the gadget and, in an instant, search and open your Google documents (hint: pressing the shift key twice brings up all your hidden Desktop gadgets).


Another handy feature is drag-and-drop uploading of files. Let's say you have a dozen documents you'd like to upload and convert to Google Docs. We'll make the claim that it is easier and faster to drag the files onto the gadget, rather than uploading them one at a time.


If you like to look at actual code, the gadget has been open sourced and can serve as a basic demonstration of how to integrate desktop applications with Google Docs using the Google Documents List Data API.

The gadget works with Linux and Windows versions of Google Desktop Gadgets. For those who use Google Apps at work, the gadget supports your work accounts as well. We hope you'll enjoy and let us know what you think. Please also send us advance copies of any romance novels you happen to write (we are both big fans of the genre).

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager & James Yum, Desktop Engineer

We've launched a new Google Docs Help Forum

As some of you may have already noticed, the Google Docs Help Forum (in English) has undergone a makeover. Here's what we've added:

• Question & answer format to help you find answered threads quickly
  
• Profiles that allow you to associate a picture with your username
  
• Ability to subscribe to threads by email or RSS feed so you can get updates
  
• Votes for the best answer to a question, and the ability to tag an answer to your question as the 'Best answer.'
  

Your feedback proved invaluable when designing the new platform. Thanks in advance for your patience as we work to build a community in the new Google Docs Help Forum. We hope you'll come check it out.

Note for non-English Docs users: if you participate in the Help Forum in another language, rest assured that our engineers are working on making this new platform available in additional languages, but we don't have a date at this time. 

Posted by: Stephen Drennan (AKA Google Docs Guide 'Steve')

Start a new document from Gmail

Last month, we announced a Google Docs gadget as a new feature in Gmail Labs. Today, I wanted to let you know about another Docs feature in Gmail Labs called "Create a Document". It gives you the ability to 1) turn an email (with all of its replies) into a Google document and 2) create a new blank document using a keyboard shortcut: 'g' and then 'w'.

Read more about this new feature on the Gmail blog.

Then try it out by going to the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, selecting "Enable" next to "Create a document" and hitting "Save Changes" at the bottom. Oh, and if you want to use that new keyboard shortcut, remember that you'll need to have keyboard shortcuts turned "on" in your General settings in Gmail.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

It's a girl... and her name is Athena

Last week, Jason Morrison (a Google employee) and his wife Ann had their first child, the beautiful baby girl pictured above. The baby's name is Athena Marie Morrison. What's cool, fascinating, and crazy (all at the same time) about Athena's name is that Jason and Ann asked family, friends, co-workers and even random strangers across the Internet to help them name their baby.

In early September, Jason posted a simple request on his personal blog "Hey Internet, Help Us Name Our Child!" Then over the next few months, over 10,000 people all over the world voted in the baby name poll. Jason was even interviewed on Australian TV about this naming experiment.

We followed the developments intently because Jason used a Google Docs spreadsheet form to collect the votes, analyze the data, and display the results on his blog as the votes came in.

Congratulations, Jason and Ann. And welcome to the world, Athena!

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Spreading holiday cheer...Google Docs style

In addition to our initial set of holiday templates, we've just added some new holiday-themed forms to help you organize your party guest lists, Secret Santa's and more.

In the spirit of the season, we also thought it might be fun to show a more playful side of Google Docs, so here's a short video to celebrate the holidays -- enjoy!


Happy Holidays from all of us on the Google Docs team!

Posted by: Vivian Leung & Andrew Chang, Google Docs Marketing

New: Forms added to the templates gallery

We've recently added a whole new section to the templates gallery for form templates. You'll find 13 new forms that cover a wide range of uses including personal health management, improving customer satisfaction and planning a party.

Here are three shining examples:

• Training for a marathon? Check out the 'Running Log' template below. This will make getting into shape much easier.

• Curious to know what your visitors think of your website? The 'Website Satisfaction and Feedback Survey' form provides companies a way to easily collect user feedback & improve satisfaction.

• There's more to life than working out and working, like planning a party. With the holidays around the corner, the 'RSVP form for a Holiday Party or Event' form below will buy you a little more time.

 

I hope that you get a lot of use out of these new forms. Don't forget that you can either email the form to your respondents directly for them to fill out or embed your form into your website or blog to collect responses online.

Posted by: Joelle Fornengo, Google Docs Operations

Get to Google Docs from Gmail

Are you a Gmail addict? Ever wanted quicker access to your online documents without having to leave your precious inbox? Well, we've recently launched a Google Docs gadget to give you direct access to your documents straight from Gmail.

By default the gadget shows a list of your most recently accessed documents, but you can change this to documents you own, you have opened or you have starred. And let's not forget search - you can find any document by typing a few letters into the search box.

This gadget isn't just about accessing your documents. You drag any document from the gadget into an email you are composing and the unique link to your document automatically shows up in your email - a quick and easy way to share your documents with others. Similarly, you can also create a document while composing an email with the "New" menu in the gadget.

We've launched this as a Gmail Labs feature - so to turn on this gadget, sign in to Gmail. Then click Settings, then visit the Labs tab. Scroll to the bottom to find the Google Docs gadget, select "Enable", and then click "Save Changes."

Posted by: Aleem Mawani, Product Manager & Ted Chen, Software Engineer

Get a headstart on the holidays with Docs templates

The holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, but preparing for the holidays can sometimes be time-consuming and stressful. Whether you're still planning your Thanksgiving party, or already working on your gift shopping list, you might want to check out our new templates for the holidays -- a series of templates designed to help make your holidays a little more efficient (and cost-effective, too).

You'll find everything from party invites, holiday cards, to gift tags and much more. We've highlighted a few of our favorites below. These ones in particular were custom-designed by Googlers; and as with all of our templates, they are available to you for free in our Template Gallery.


Gift Certificate (Snowflake Theme)









Holiday Newsletter (Candy Cane Theme)









Party Invitation (Snowman Theme)








Only 8 days until Thanksgiving... :)

Posted by: Vivian Leung, Product Marketing Manager

Online petition for an organic farm at the White House

In early September, Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow visited Google in their modified double-decker school bus. Their bus is really two buses fused together with an organic garden on the roof. (The picture above shows our very own Jen Mazzon holding a cauliflower in front of the bus).

Daniel and Casey are leading a petition-based initiative to request that the next president plant an organic farm on the grounds of the White House. Their visit to Google was one stop in their cross-country drive in the bus. At Google, they had lunch with employees, including a Google chef. Daniel and Casey recently arrived in Washington, D.C., just in time for election day.

Everywhere they've gone, from farmers markets to truck stops, they carry a physical petition with them. They've also created an online version of their petition using a Google Docs spreadsheet form. Daniel tells us that they've collected over 1,500 online signatures so far using this form. Check out their online petition and then let us know in the comments of this post if you've used forms for your own petition or cause.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Create and embed presentations in your LinkedIn profile

You're now able to embed a Google Docs presentation in your LinkedIn profile, allowing you to enhance your professional profile with text, images, and even videos.

For those of you unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it's the world's largest online professional network. LinkedIn allows you to create a profile that showcases your skills and talents, and helps you find and connect with your trusted contacts and share ideas and opportunities.

Who might benefit from an embedded presentation in their profile? Graphic designers and photographers can showcase examples of their work or even their entire portfolios. Musicians and media producers can display performances and videos using embedded YouTube videos in their slides. But these are just a few ideas.

Our LinkedIn application was built on OpenSocial, an open standard for building social applications across the web, which means that in the future, it will be easy to run this app on any site that supports OpenSocial.

Add our app in LinkedIn to display your own Google Docs presentation in your profile.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Interesting ways to use Docs in the Classroom

Tom Barrett is back again for a third guest post. This time, he offers practical tips for using Google Docs in class and asks for help adding more tips. The collaborative presentation he and other teachers are creating will be a great complement to all of the ideas and projects we collected from K-12 teachers in September. We're in the process of sorting through the many great submissions and will share them with everyone in the near future. And so, without further ado, here's Tom.

The mornings are becoming darker and the leaves are changing colour here in England, the Autumn school term is in full swing. We have been using Google Docs (as part of Apps Education Edition) with a new year group for 8 weeks and we are putting into action some of the many things we learned from last year's implementation.

Whilst in the previous two posts I have explored many of the broader themes that must underpin the way sharing online docs should be approached in the classroom, I am now knee deep in the practicalities of using Google Docs with our classes. This post will hopefully give you some practical ways to use the tool in the classroom, some inspiration as to where to start and some usage tips that will help it all run smoothly.

Over the last year I have begun two presentations that share practical tips in the use of Google Earth and the Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom. I have set the presentations up so that anyone with a practical tip can become a collaborator by sharing editing rights with them. In this way the presentation expands with the advice and tips from real users and from a much wider audience of educators. All you need to do is send me your email and I will be able to add you as a collaborator to the presentation, so you can add just 1 or even 10 tips for the use of Google Docs in the classroom. (See details at the end of the presentation)

The first five are my tips, in no particular order, to get the presentation started. It is currently called "[Insert #] interesting ways (and tips) to use Google Docs in the Classroom" - but I hope that you can find time to add your own and share your advice with Google Docs users so that the name changes! Or perhaps you would prefer to just use the presentation as part of your staff training - it is all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0. 

Posted by: Tom Barrett, Assistant Headteacher

Featured gadget: Gantt charts in spreadsheets

Recently, the Google Docs team started working with Viewpath, a company dedicated to providing project management solutions. In keeping with this commitment, they recently added a Gantt chart gadget to the spreadsheets platform. Here on the Docs team, we're thrilled to have this top-notch external developer contributing their expertise, and adding value to Google Docs. To introduce this gadget, we're happy to have Dean Carlson here as guest blogger. Dean is CEO ofViewpath, and helped in the development of Docs' Gantt chart gadget.

One of the great things about Google Docs is the opportunity it offers developers to create and integrate their own products into the spreadsheets application as gadgets.

Here at Viewpath, we took this opportunity to create a Gantt chart gadget. For those of you not familiar, a Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, and can be invaluable in managing large initiatives.

Our Gantt chart gadget displays timelines based on data entered in your spreadsheet. You can enter a few numbers, representing the progress in different areas of a project. Quickly and easily, our gadget displays it graphically in an easy-to-read chart that refreshes automatically whenever you change the data on your spreadsheet.

One of the clear advantages of hosting this chart in a Google spreadsheet, instead of in a separate document, is that you no longer need to elect one person to keep track of and update the chart. Instead, everyone working on the team can access the spreadsheet, enter progress as it happens, and have that progress displayed instantly for all to see. They can even add tasks, being confident that everyone on the team will see the most recent plan.

At Viewpath, one of our goals is to make project management as seamless as possible. In keeping with this goal, we're thrilled to be able to create practical project management resources for Google Docs users.

For instructions on creating your own Gantt chart, check out the short video we created.



For more info on creating and integrating your own gadget using the Spreadsheets API, see "Getting Started with Spreadsheet Gadgets".

Posted by: Dean Carlson, Viewpath CEO

Featured gadget: Gantt charts in spreadsheets

Recently, the Google Docs team started working with Viewpath, a company dedicated to providing project management solutions. In keeping with this commitment, they recently added a Gantt chart gadget to the spreadsheets platform. Here on the Docs team, we're thrilled to have this top-notch external developer contributing their expertise, and adding value to Google Docs. To introduce this gadget, we're happy to have Dean Carlson here as guest blogger. Dean is CEO of Viewpath, and helped in the development of Docs' Gantt chart gadget.

One of the great things about Google Docs is the opportunity it offers developers to create and integrate their own products into the spreadsheets application as gadgets.

Here at Viewpath, we took this opportunity to create a Gantt chart gadget. For those of you not familiar, a Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, and can be invaluable in managing large initiatives.

Our Gantt chart gadget displays timelines based on data entered in your spreadsheet. You can enter a few numbers, representing the progress in different areas of a project. Quickly and easily, our gadget displays it graphically in an easy-to-read chart that refreshes automatically whenever you change the data on your spreadsheet.

One of the clear advantages of hosting this chart in a Google spreadsheet, instead of in a separate document, is that you no longer need to elect one person to keep track of and update the chart. Instead, everyone working on the team can access the spreadsheet, enter progress as it happens, and have that progress displayed instantly for all to see. They can even add tasks, being confident that everyone on the team will see the most recent plan.

At Viewpath, one of our goals is to make project management as seamless as possible. In keeping with this goal, we're thrilled to be able to create practical project management resources for Google Docs users.

To get a sample project plan spreadsheet with an embedded Gantt chart, click .

For instructions on creating your own Gantt chart, check out the short video we created.

Adding footnotes to your documents

Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and a footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.

When you print or save as your document as a PDF, your footnotes will appear at the bottom of the page. You can see how your footnotes will appear when printed by selecting Print (Ctrl+P) or Download file as... PDF from the File menu. However, if you download your document as a Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML file, your footnotes will appear as endnotes, at the end of your document.

Update: Added a video that shows you how to insert footnotes.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Adding footnotes to your documents

Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.

[Insert image of a footnote in the margin]

When you print or save as your document as a PDF, your footnotes will appear at the bottom of the page. You can see how your footnotes will appear when printed by selecting Print (Ctrl+P) or Download file as... PDF from the File menu. However, if you download your document as a Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML file, your footnotes will appear as endnotes, at the end of your document.

[Insert an image of a footnote at the bottom of a PDF]

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Coming soon: Changes to the spreadsheets interface

Next week, we'll be introducing a new interface for our spreadsheet application, polishing up the navigation and making it look and feel like our word processing and presentation tools. At the top of the page, a new set of menus is the place to look for all of your favorite spreadsheet features. In the toolbar, we've concentrated the most commonly-used features as shortcuts to make formatting data easier and faster. And the Share menu (look for the big blue button) contains everything you need to invite people to work together, publish to the web and share with the world.

Some of our favorite details are the subtle ones. For example, whenever a form is active, the menu shows a count of your total responses. And now it's even easier to insert a formula, switch between number and date formats, or access help content.

Behind the scenes, the new streamlined interface loads the spreadsheets application even faster.

Everything you know and love about spreadsheets will still be available—just better organized. And the best part of these changes is that we'll have room to add more great new features. Stay tuned.

(click image to enlarge)

Posted by: Joseph Wain & Michelle Lee, User Experience Designers and Eric Bogs, UI Software Engineer

The dreaded bibliography

Throughout my school days, one huge headache when writing a paper was that dreaded and extremely tedious bibliography. As a way for students, teachers, and professors to ease into the school year, we decided to create four bibliography templates representing various citation styles. We've created these templates so that students in various disciplines could reap the benefit of using one of these templates and copying these styles in their papers.

You'll find these templates in the Students & Teachers section of the templates gallery. As a sneak preview, take a look below at the American Psychological Association style bibliography template. All of you social science majors will get good use out of this one.

Updates: Corrected the title of this post and the link to the gallery.

Posted by: Joelle Fornengo, Google Docs Operations

It's about communication, not the tool

A few weeks ago, Tom Barrett wrote about how he introduces Year 5 students to Google Docs. This week he shares some common challenges teachers face when students begin working together on collaborative projects.

Communication is important, not the tool

The success of our own class projects was not influenced by how well the children could use Google Docs. After all, it is not really about the tool -- it's about the group's ability to work together as a team. My class found this difficult throughout the year. I did not expect that just because we were using technology that the outcome would be any different. In fact even though each child was engaged with a role within the group and a task to complete, the technology exacerbated the lack of communication. The groups were plodding on with their own tasks and when it buffeted with someone else's they would get upset. They may be working in the same online space, but that does not automatically indicate they are collaborating well.

With this in mind we raised the profile of the sense of communication within the groups and discussed with the children their teething problems and how we can best resolve them. With every resolution I drew it back to the idea of better communication. The class had a fuller understanding from these discussions of what they were doing when working together in Google Docs and some of the ways that their own communication was causing problems. To reinforce this in future sessions I would regularly stop the class to talk about an excellent example I had overheard from an individual or a group. One such example was when the children in one group lowered their laptop screens so that they could discuss the progress of their work so far. I raised it with the wider group ,we briefly discussed why it was such a good move, and through this we then saw the majority of the groups adopting this strategy.

How student personalities and familiarity with technology affect group work

You know what it is like: you try and balance a team and consider the characters that you put together in a group, but within moments they are falling out! I suppose using Google Docs does not make the task any easier. Out of the 5 groups in my class, 2 worked very well together, 1 was OK and the other 2 had lots of problems and struggled. On reflection, the groups that worked least well together were made up of perhaps 2 or 3 strong personalities that would naturally like to take a lead and this caused conflicts and problems as it has in other activities. When the children have their own laptops and a clear contribution to make within a document, that is appropriately structured, in my experience it can help a group work together.

I had children in my class that were very capable at using technology and were motivated and enthused at its use in our lessons but who often struggled with their literacy or maths, they were more confident when collaborating with Google Docs because of their own personal comfort with technology in the classroom. They pushed themselves forward to take a lead and be more involved when in a more traditional paper-based activity they may not have done. Similarly, the flip side of this is children who are very confident and capable in literacy who perhaps have less confidence when using technology. Even though composing groups within your class to collaborate is similar for any activity, it is important to consider the type of characters who grows in confidence when embedding technology in their learning.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Calling all teachers: Share your ideas and projects

Last week we rolled out some back to school features, many of them inspired by your requests and stories of using Google Docs in K-12 classrooms. 

Now we're turning our sights to a new initiative. We want to collect your example projects and ideas for how to best use Google Docs (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and forms) in the classroom. We'll collect your ideas and share them with all educators on our Docs page on the Google for Educators site. To do this, we first need your inspiration and ideas.

• Are you using Google Docs in a K-12 classroom?
  
• Have you created any group projects that use the collaborative features of docs, presentations, or spreadsheets?
  
• Are you using spreadsheet forms to collect information from students or parents?
  

If you answered "yes" to any of these, we'd love to hear from you.

Learn more about what we're looking for and check out two example project ideas. Then, submit your own project idea by Sept 30, 2008. As a big "thank you" from us, we'll give out moleskin journals to the first 50 teachers who submit projects.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Google Docs Operations

We launched Table of Contents, too

I'm writing this from the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, just 5 minutes before I hop on a plane back to Google in California. I spent the day at Arizona State University (ASU), the second stop on our Apps to School bus tour of U.S. college campuses. Boy, it was hot outside today: 94 F (34 C). I really enjoyed talking to students about Google tools like Docs and introducing them to new Docs features like our template gallery and forms.

Before I board, I wanted to point out another useful feature that we forgot to mention on yesterday's blog post: Table of Contents. In the Format menu, you can use the following for section headings: Heading, Sub-heading and Minor heading. Then, insert a Table of Contents on the first page of your document.

To learn more about Table of Contents, check out this help center article.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Back to school with a bunch of new features

Fight on, Trojans! Yesterday, we spent the day at the University of Southern California, the first stop on the App to School bus tour of U.S. college campuses. We hung out with a lot of students (and some professors, too) who dropped by our demo stations, and showed them our favorite tips and tricks in Google Docs. Some of them also told us about how they used Docs in their classes, clubs, and even side businesses. In our down time, Jen and I managed to don some Trojan colors and snap a photo. :)

And just in time for back to school, we've got some new features that will definitely help you get ahead in class:

Dictionary & Thesaurus
You now can highlight a word and look up its definition and synonyms using Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Look for this feature in the Tools menu, just below the Spell-check and Word Count. Now you're just two clicks away from being able to look up and hear pronunciations of hundreds of thousands of words. These tools are available in English only.


Encyclopedia
You can also look up a term in Encyclopedia Britannica from within Docs. Students and teachers should find this feature useful when writing reports and doing research online. Here's what an encyclopedia entry looks like for "Trojan War":


Search for words and images on Google
Fans of Google Image Search will be happy to see that you can also find and insert images into your documents. Again, you just highlight a word or phrase. Then, use Tools>Search... using Image Search. Once you find the right image, you can drag-and-drop that image directly into your document.

Posted by: Jen Mazzon, Product Manager and Vivian Leung, Product Marketing Manager

Presentations turns 1

We've been quiet for a while but are letting the news out. Presentations is nearing our first birthday, and we're unveiling a slew of new features that will make your presentations pop.

To start off the announcement... reveals! You can set the order that objects appear. Or, setup a textbox to reveal paragraphs or bullets one at a time as you're giving a presentation. Reveals are perfect for pacing your talk, keeping the audience focused on you rather than reading the slide content, and constructing neat visual sequences. Set the order that an object appears by right-clicking on it and selecting "Incremental Reveal".

If you'd like to see reveals in action, check out this presentation.

You'll also notice a complete face lift of our user interface. Now that we're growning up, we wanted to give you more space to edit your slides and still allow you to get to the right features to create your slides. With this new design you'll see a significant increase in slide space, improving the experience on smaller laptop screens.


Another oft-wished-for feature is Zoom. Just go to the Slide>Zoom menu to zoom in or out, letting you work on slide details to your heart's content.


Finally, for all you Ctrl+Z fanatics out there, full undo/redo is now available in presentations. Never say "doh" again, undo is there to save the day.

With that, we invite you to give these new presentation features a try. We're excited to be turning 1 and look forward to another jam-packed year!

Posted by: Andrew Perelson, Docs Engineer

Teachers... last chance to register for Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future

In August, I announced our sponsorship of Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing opportunity for U.S. high school students. I invited teachers to ask their students to write to the next U.S. president about the issues that matter to them the most.

The deadline to register for this project is Friday, Sept. 12th.

Teachers and mentors: all that you need to do is get an account on the National Writing Project website and provide your name, school name, contact information, and a brief description of the class or group of students you want to have participate. Visit nwp.org/r/letters2president to learn more and register.

Update: Due to popular demand, registration has been extended to September 12, 2008.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Tips for introducing online collaboration to students

Tom Barrett is an assistant headteacher at a primary school in north Nottinghamshire, England. We first noticed Tom's blog in May when he gave a week by week account of introducing Google Docs and Google Apps to his Year 5 students. Tom's starting a new term this September and we've invited him to share some best practices for introducing new people (in his case, his 10-year-olds) to Google Docs.

Modeling expected behavior and good practices first

As our first Google Docs project began to gather pace last school year, I realised that the children were finding it difficult to work together. With hindsight it is easier to recognise that the children were not only being introduced to a new piece of technology (the Docs tool) but also their traditional way of working was to be challenged by the new concept of working collaboratively in an online document.

It was clear that the children were unsure about the way they should be working together. They were each working on their own laptop and it was not the technical side of things that they struggled with, it was the fact they were expected to interact with others in their group as well as use a screen. I found it very useful to model the process. Just as I would if I were showing the children a style of writing in Literacy or a type of stretch in PE. I worked with a colleague on an example document and gave the class a running commentary as to what we were doing. As we worked we talked to each other and I underlined some of the key features of what made that short demo collaboration successful for us.

I think that every class of children will respond differently to the challenge of working together in an online doc, but it proved incredibly valuable to our classes to model what is expected of them. In September, I'll have a new class and I will be keeping in mind this idea from the outset. Another idea would be to encourage the students to demonstrate the concept to the class - this is much harder to show but valuable nonetheless. I will be planning in time to model the technical and communications side of working together and also reflective time with the groups throughout the project to discuss and review the process of collaborating.

Introducing group collaboration: entire class, working in pairs, and groups of four

With the 9 and 10 year-olds in my classes, I found it valuable to take small steps towards an open collaborative project with 4 or 5 group members. As I introduced Google Docs to the class, we began to work together on documents that everyone could contribute to, revealing the ways that it worked and how it updates. In many respects this could be labelled as modelling the process that the children will in turn use later on. It proved valuable to be able to prove the concept to the children in a simple "step in, step out" controlled type contribution, nothing protracted. We added ideas to a large grid within a spreadsheet, with the children being told to choose any cell to write in - you could also invite them to fill in some information about themselves next to their name in a class list document. This single contribution to a whole class document was our first step.

It was followed by children working together in pairs on one document - a laptop each, sitting next to each other and sharing the document between them both. Finally the children worked in a larger group of 4 in a more lengthy collaboration as part of a Geography project. I believe it is important to progressively build up to bigger group collaboration and for this coming academic year I will be taking the same approach in developing the children's collaboration experience over the first 6 weeks of term.

Posted by: Tom Barrett, Assistant Headteacher

Another summer, another thank you note to our interns

I know it's not over yet - but summer has flown by too quickly again. We know it's coming to an end when we start saying 'goodbye' to the incredibly talented interns who joined our team for the summer. With the goodbyes are always a load of thank yous for what they've added to Google Docs. Here are some anecdotes:

Shrikant Shanbhag says, "The fact that I got to work on what I asked for and to see all the changes I made actually make it to production is immensely gratifying. Some of the keyboard shortcuts I implemented are incidentally the only features that I can conceivably demonstrate to my friends and family. I say, 'Look I did this' when asked what I did during the summer and there are always 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' in response." Shrikant's work on our offline capabilities in spreadsheets also seems to have removed a bunch of "ouch"es from our user community. For that we are grateful.

Justin Kosslyn worked on spreadsheet gadgets, and as he describes it, "embedded himself in the team, retrieved information from a range of sources, internally processed the data, generated interactive analysis, and shared it with relevant parties. I can't help but notice that this is awfully similar to what spreadsheet gadgets do." Ya think maybe we had him too focused?

Jessie Berlin took on several projects within the Forms feature of Docs, including required questions, lots of bug fixes, and... oops, I almost gave away the other killer features which haven't launched yet. Jessie didn't have a quote to add here, but she's currently running a survey using Forms to get ideas for what she should say. ;-)

Jorrit Herder implemented several critical parts of the infrastructure behind some exciting upcoming features. We can't describe them yet, so you'll just have to trust on this one for a while. Many of you will one day thank Jorrit for his part in improving our products significantly.

Erdal Tuleu worked on some much needed improvements and fixes to our spreadsheet APIs including some not yet launched methods for controlling data feeds.

Matt Ziegelbaum categorizes his work this summer as "incredibly non-glamorous", which, in our minds, means necessary and high priority work. He's helped to speed up the application and made it easier to maintain and add features without degrading performance. He had the advantage of being with us last summer, too - so he knew where to look for improvements.

Roshni Malani, aka our Rubik's Cube Queen, slam-dunked a series of killer features in presentations, getting way more done than the team dreamed of. Watch for her improvements to come in presentations soon!

Grant Dasher's code has already launched and has been used by anyone who's visited the templates gallery. Star ratings for templates and "Templates I've Used" were all Grant. And thanks to him, you can embed a template in your web page. We can't spill the beans about the rest of his work quite yet.

Angelo Dinardi has developed some soon-to-be-released functionality for the document editor that students can use for their term papers this fall. We'll be sure to credit him on the feature announcement blog post.

Isaiah Greene has improved the folder view in Docs, making it easier for all users to add descriptions and colored labels to folders, as well as name/edit/delete them. If you haven't yet used folders in Google Docs, try creating one now and you'll see Isaiah's handiwork in action.

David Bloom has been knocking bugs upside their heads all summer long, and has decided to complete his last remaining units online so that he can stay with us indefinitely. We are ecstatic that David has chosen to stick with us, so no 'good-bye' for Bloom!

Rob Turer worked on a top secret project out of our Boulder, Colorado office. Here's what the censors are letting us say: Rob created a proof-of-concept framework for Docs that will enable users to [bleeeep] when someone [bleeeep] [bleeeep] . Some people might call it [bleeeep], but we think there's a lot of users who might want to [bleeeep]. Oh, and Rob also helped convert his cubicle "pod" at Google Boulder into a model of the International Space Station.

Nikolay Valtchanov has been digging through the innermost workings of the document editor to make it generally speedier and more efficient. You won't see his work since it's all under the hood but if you notice that the document editors feels faster... well it probably is, thanks to Nikolay.

Update: Corrected Rob Turer's section, adding the missing "bleeeeps" that were supposed to be there in the initial post.

Update: Corrected Erdal's last name. Sorry, Erdal!

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager

Forms move out of their parents' basement (and other improvements)

We made a few improvements to the spreadsheets editor this week, which you can read about in our user group. Among the changes were some improvements to Forms.

The most visible change makes the whole Forms feature more accessible to you, since "spreadsheets" isn't the first place you'd look to create a form. We noticed that many of you search for "Forms" from your Docs List and from within the other editors (documents, presentations). So, we've made Forms accessible directly from your Docs List in the "New" menu.

Next, we changed the Forms interface a bit to make it easier for you to add and edit the questions in a form while giving you more clues about the types of questions available. You can also delete a form completely now in addition to just turning it off (not accepting additional responses).

We also now identify each spreadsheet with a Form using a special icon on your Docs List.


Moving out from under the shadow of its spreadsheet parent seems like a good step - but give us feedback if you've got other ideas. Just wait until Forms is old enough to drive... Oh, the places we'll go!

Posted by: Andrew Bonventre, Engineer

Students will tell us... what issues matter the most

The U.S. presidential campaign is drawing unprecedented interest among young people. What issues matter most to America's youth? Are they concerned about the economy and gas prices? Or is climate change, Iraq, or global terrorism foremost on their minds? We'd like to find out by giving them the ability to express themselves through their words during the period of the presidential election.

We've teamed up with the National Writing Project to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they want America's next president to address.

During the presidential campaign, high school teachers will guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter addressed to the candidates. Topics will be chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests. Google Docs will allow teachers to incorporate peer review, revisions, and publishing into support of these letters. Participating students will publish their letters online to a Letters to the Next President website (which launches in September) for their peers, parents, and the public to read.

Students and teachers, visit our Letters to the Next President project page learn more. The registration deadline is Sept 12, 2008.

To see how teachers and students are using Google Docs to enable effective peer review and publishing, watch the following video:





Update: Due to popular demand, registration has been extended to September 12, 2008.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

2008 Editors’ Best award

A big "thank you" goes out to the editors of Windows IT Pro Magazine for naming Google Docs a winner in the "Breakthrough Product" category. We're honored.

Update: Corrected the name of the magazine.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Educators in Portugal, México, and Germany speak out

Several months ago, Joelle asked teachers to tell us how they've been using Docs in the classroom. We received stories from professors and instructors all over the world. In today's post, I'd like to highlight three specific educators from México, Germany and Portugal:

Jose I. Icaza is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey N.L., México. He teaches courses in Leadership for Sustainable Development.

"I use Docs documents to have my graduate students write bibliographic research reports coauthored by them all. As an example, in the course 'Leadership for sustainable development,' my 15 students recently wrote together the report Sustainable communities and cities: cases and plans. Each student was to find out about a planned or real sustainable place, incorporate his or her findings into the report and improve the overall report with the instruction: 'Leave the whole report better than you found it.' Grade for this activity depended both on the quality of the individual contribution and the quality of the whole finished report. It was so good that we then hit 'publish' and here it is [in Spanish]."

Stephan Rinke is a subject area manager in the languages department of Volkshochschule Essen, an adult education college in Essen, Germany. He was also an early contributor to our community channel on YouTube.

"We often use Google Docs in our language courses to give students the opportunity to improve their writing skills cooperatively. Frequently we create Google Documents as a basis for group work. Typical activities include:

• making a boring text more interesting by adding more detailed descriptions as well as adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
• changing the tense of a text to practise grammar (e.g. changing a text from present tense into future tense)
• spotting and correcting mistakes (e.g. wrong verb endings, typical misspellings, etc.)

Students find these tasks motivating and also create class notes and longer documents collaboratively. And with Google Docs being web-based, students often use the opportunity to complete their group tasks from home. Google Docs plays an important role in our efforts to promote cooperative learning."


António Oliveira teaches Information Systems at IPCA (Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave) in Barcelos, Portugal.

"My name is Pedro Oliveira and I'm giving a class of information systems on IPCA (Barcelos, Portugal). In the last semester, all my students delivered a document (done in groups of two students) with their final work. They liked very much the possibility of using Docs to work in the same document, without having the problem of managing the versions, worries about the security and backup plus. One of the main features that I found was the ability of following their work (each group gave me access to the document), since the first day, inserting comments along the documents and giving clues to the students. Moreover in the end all of their work was published (with a click) and presented to the student community. All I want to say is thanks for the excellent tools that you have and keep up the excellent work."

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Docs in the blogs

A quick note to point you, yet again, to an exceptional use case described in the Teaching With Technology blog.

In a recent post, Mr. Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of setting up parent:teacher meetings easily using Docs.

Take inspiration from this idea, and as always, feel free to leave a comment and let us know how you use Docs to make things a bit easier :)

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Forms take a vacation

Don Campbell is President of Expand2Web, and dedicates his career to helping small business owners with local store-fronts connect with customers over the web. Here, he proves his tech-savvy creativity by showing us a very fun, and seasonally-appropriate use of forms.

I spend most of my time every day working with small business owners helping them with their local search strategy to get more customers from the web. But sometimes the best solutions emerge from how you use the web at home...

A good friend of mine organizes a family beach camping trip every year on the coast, just South of Santa Cruz. The campground is situated on the bluffs overlooking the beach and the Pacific ocean.

Its a great setup since most of us have young kids, and as you know if you’ve got kids they *love* to play on the beach and in the surf. We’ve figured out how to get a group of campsites that are perfectly placed in the redwoods and eucalyptus trees along the bluff every year. We spend the days down on the beach with the kids and the evenings at the campsite. It’s one of those truly magical trips that we all look forward to every year.

But this year we had a problem - the trip has been getting very popular as our core set of families started telling friends about it, and we were up to 100 people from 24 families who wanted to go on the trip!

We were able to book enough campsites for this many people, but our key challenge was how to manage the meals. Imagine having to cook dinner for 100 people!

We had everyone's email addresses, and were brainstorming on how to coordinate the meals so that everyone could contribute, and there would be enough food for every meal. I had used the new Forms feature in Google Spreadsheets for a few of my customers in the past, and got an idea that it might be able to help us here too.

So here’s what we did:
1) I set up a Google Spreadsheet with the information we wanted to collect from each of the families. We collected information like:

• Family name
• How many adults
• How many children
• Which meals will you be eating
• Choose a preferred meal to prepare (e.g. Saturday breakfast)
• Menu plan
• Special requirements
• Phone #

2) We turned this into a Form, and sent it out to our list of families. As I mentioned, we already had their email addresses, so we were able to include the form directly in their email! They could also click a link to view the entire spreadsheet - we wanted everyone to be able to see what everyone else was doing, although Google Spreadsheets does allow you to restrict this.

3) Amazingly, we had almost all of our responses within 3 days! I was expecting some phone calls and emails from people who were a little confused or didn’t understand how the form worked, or how to view the spreadsheet. But I had zero questions. And I know that many of the families are not exactly comfortable in front of the computer if you know what I mean. What I DID get were comments from four of the families saying “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that with Google! Can you show me how to do this? So I sent them to Google Docs and shared this video - Quick and Easy Forms - with them and that was all they needed to get going.

A few of the things that made this a very workable solution:

1. We were able to create and share the form within minutes.
2. Spreadsheet updates in real time allowed my friend and I - in different locations - to see the same data as it came in, in case we needed to adjust anything or track how things were going.
3. The ability to include the form in an email made it super easy for people to fill it out right away.
4. The ability to let everyone view the spreadsheet over the web in their browser allowed them to see what other families were doing, or get their phone number in case they needed to discuss how they were going to team up on a meal, for example.

Our trip is later this month, and now we’ve got the meal plans all figured out two weeks in advance. With that out of the way I’m looking forward to a great camping trip and meeting some fun new families. Oh yeah, and eating some really good meals too!


Posted by: Don Campbell, President of Expand2Web and happy camper

Templates bring Docs to life

What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today.


When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and fax cover letters and invoices to run your businesses. And of course you want to use documents in fun ways with family and friends, such as unique designs and layouts for invitation cards and calendars. Finally, everyone wants to be able to have tools that "just work": print mailing labels, track portfolio values, and manage projects without having to painstakingly create documents from scratch.

These needs inspired our new templates and gallery. We developed these in conjunction with Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business.

Many templates leverage the collaborative aspect of Google Docs so that several people can work on a single document online without having to email attachments back and forth. To hear the story behind two templates, watch these videos:





To get started, go directly to the template gallery or access it from the "New" menu in your document list. Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon. They're also available to Google Apps users.


Posted by: Valerie Blechar, Google Docs Templates Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)