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.)

Live blogging with Docs

Posted by: Amit Agarwal, a professional technology blogger at Digital Inspiration and an exceptionally creative Docs user

We were first introduced to Amit Agarwal when he sent us a video, detailing how to use Docs as an RSS feed reader (check out the accompanying and instructive blog post, as well). We watched the video, read his blog post, and were completely impressed. So, we got in touch, and are now happy to have Amit as a guest blogger, showcasing his newest cool idea for using Docs.

This tutorial will show you how to use Google Docs word processor for blogging a live event – it could be a keynote address or a conference call with media or someone speaking at a local BarCamp in your city.

To get started you would need a laptop computer, a free Google account and few inches of free space to sit (or stand) in the conference room. OK, we are now ready to roll.

Create a new document in Google Docs and give it some descriptive name (like “Launch of Blue Widgets Version 2”) - this will later become the title of our blog post.

Write some placeholder text in the document (like “Stay Tuned, we’ll cover the event live here.”) and save (Ctrl+S).

Now you have two options here. You can either embed this Google document in your blog as an IFRAME or you can republish the contents of this document as a new blog post (better approach though it requires an additional step).

Embed a live document in your blog

From the Share Menu, select “Publish as Web Page” and “Publish Document.” Also check the setting that says “Automatically re-publish when changes are made.”

Go back to the document and select “View as Web Page” from the File menu. What you now see on the screen is a plain vanilla document without any toolbars and menus. To embed this in your blog, copy the URL from the browser bar and use an IFRAME tag (find an example tag linked here).

Now as soon as you write something in this Google document and hit save, the content will appear instantly on your blog. If someone is reading your live blog already, he may have to reload the page.

Republish the Google Document in your blog

From the Share Menu, select “Publish as Web Page” followed by “Post to Blog.”

Now there’s a small trick involved here. Without closing the existing window, open a new tab in the browser and load the same document.

When you add new content to your “live blog” document, switch to the previous window and hit “Republish Post” – Google Docs will overwrite the previous version of your blog post so you readers will always see the latest version. Continue the write –> save –> republish cycle until the even is over.

What are the advantages of using Google Docs for Live Blogging?

First and foremost - you are live-blogging on your own website and not on some third-party platform – that means you retain all the web traffic. Second, Google Docs offers a very rich blog editor so you get to include photos, hyperlinks, tables, etc in your blog post as per the need. And the Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut is your best friend – you can save content without reloading the page.

To insert current date in a Google Document

Most live blogs carry a timestamp next to each update. While there’s no shortcut key to insert dates in Google Docs, you may use the Ctrl + M key that is normally used for inserting comments. It gives you the current date as well as that authors name which you may discard before publishing the blog.

Blogs we like, for teachers

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Reviewing and revising

My colleague, and one of Docs' marketing managers, Andrew Chang, emailed me the other day, thrilled to have discovered an incredibly incisive post covering a number of ways to leave feedback and organize students' writing process using Docs.

I was as impressed with the post as Andrew, and we're pretty sure you'll enjoy it, too. To see for yourself, head over to Tom Barrett's ICT in my Classroom blog.

The play's the thing

Another charming and wonderfully detailed post walks us through using Docs to facilitate a scriptwriting project among teachers and students (a subject dear to my heart, as a theater enthusiast during high school :)

Especially engaging was the way in which the author presents the aim of his post, and the reason he thinks it's valid right up front, before launching into what is one of the nicest descriptions of a collaborative project using Docs that I've seen in some time.

Check it out on the Teaching with Technology blog, and start plotting your own ideas.

***

Finally, if you're a teacher, student, or edu fan new to Docs, get off to a smooth start with our teachers' guide: Using Google Docs in the Classroom, or check out the other Docs resources on the Google For Educators page.

Forms take a hike

Posted by: Garnet Gratton

Garnet Gratton is back, and in the mood for summer. In her last post, she detailed a creative lesson plan using Docs and Mars Phoenix Lander in the news. This time, she'll be telling us about her experience using Docs forms to make scheduling extremely easy, and leave more time for summer fun.

During the school year, my hiking group and I meet every six weeks or so. We hike all over Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, as well as the Channel Islands, exploring new trails and renewing our friendships in beautiful surroundings. The last time we met, we climbed rocks, forded streams, and sat at the side of a riverbed to eat lunches from our backpacks. Usually this is when we decide on our next date to get together, but this time we hiked back without deciding anything.

With summer approaching, all six of us all had plans to be away on vacations at different times. Due to so many varied schedules, it looked like we might have to suspend our meet ups for the summer. This, until my friend Mary, who knew I'd been developing Google forms for classroom applications, suggested that I send out a form to collect vacation schedules from our hiking partners. Brilliant!

(A photo from a recent hike. This is what it's all about in the end :)

Once everyone sent me their away-dates through the form, I plugged them into Google Calendar. We are all going to be busy this summer, but looking at everyone's schedules, I realized that there were still a few hiking days available. Compared to traditional scheduling, rigorous hikes are a breeze. Using Docs forms for scheduling, however, makes even easy hikes seem difficult by comparison :)

Here's the form I used to collect the info (so simple, no?)