Blog Reflection: Google Docs

I was amazed by the wide range of online educational tools offered through Google Documents to empower educators to empower learners; acquisition of knowledge and skills becomes highly interactive, genuinely engaging, accelerated, autonomous and both transparent and meaningful to the learners. Networks of communities of learners and teachers share information, collaborate conveniently in research, administration and presentations, communicate efficiently, more often, easily and in different ways, create documents, store information safely, and use tools for organization of their documents/folders and to create spreadsheets.
In addition, it is possible for educators to accurately assess and monitor the quality and quantity of the participation/contributions of individual members of a group working on a collaborative project, thus developing the level of accountability and responsibility of the learners and their powers of organization. Teachers can easily use a combination of Google Docs tools and doc folders to block in learner progress using a spreadsheet, throughout the completion of an academic program/class project.
The creation of public documents (Newsletters and letters to parents) becomes a simple action, meetings become less time-consuming when the completion of one shared document that all teachers can edit precedes the meeting, and lessons become more meaningful when interdisciplinary units are created through Google Docs. Furthermore, language teachers can use Google Docs for a whole range of activities including the creation of collaborative book reports/research papers, co-editing of written texts online, and learner-generated poetry/writing portfolios, while humanities teachers may utilize “My Map” in Google Maps to have the learners take a virtual trip through cities all around the world … this has changed the whole approach to learning and teaching, world-wide.