Shared at ICE Conference by Dr. Henry Thiele

View the tutorial on how to use Google Forms to update events/announcements in a Google Calendar while sharing reminders automatically to Facebook and Twitter Accounts. Something to think about as we envision updates to our library web presence:

Google Docs: New and Improved

The one word that describes today’s updates is collaboration.  
Google believes that “collaboration is broken”: People make revisions to the same document, but one bad save by a late person can ruin the whole document. Thus Google’s belief is that creating a browser version of collaboration software that bridges the gap between the desktop and the web is key to better collaboration and quicker innovation.

Other key upgrades:

• collaborators can now see what others are typing character-by-character
• 50 people can now collaborate on one document
• new chat feature added for enhanced collaboration
• Google added features such as rulers, tab stops, spell-check as you type and floating images
• new Spreadsheet features: auto-complete, the ability to drag-and-drop columns and faster load times, autofill
• new “drawing editor” allows you to draw and download images that can be copied and pasted into multiple Google Docs.

Attention Google Apps Users

"Over the next couple of weeks, we are rolling out the ability for Google Apps users to easily upload and securely share any type of file internally and externally using Google Docs. You get 1 GB of storage per user, and you can upload files up to 250 MB in size."

Mary Ann Apple 13 Jan 2010

100 Great Google Docs Tips

100 Great Google Docs Tips for Students & Educators posted Nov 9th, 2009 on the Colleges.org blog.

This blog links to tips beyond the basic features to make your Google Docs experience even more productive. Here are 100 great tips for using the documents, presentations and spreadsheets, keyboard short cuts and ideas for collaboration.

Use Google Doc Forms for Instant Feedback

Erika Eich and I have been collaborating on a presentation on October 31st for the 2009 ISLMA Conference, Embracing Change. Our focus was Using Google Docs, especially forms, for student feedback and teacher collaboration. The New Trier Library pages have many examples of how we’ve used this tool, including surveying interests before a project, assessment, and reflection after a project is completed. We’ve even used this feature to help students “Ask a Librarian”.

There’s much from which to choose, but here are some of the other resources we have found:

• Official Google Docs Blog
• Google Docs for Educators
• Google Docs Video from Common Craft and presentation from Google
• Google Docs tutorial from Michigan State University
• 7 Things you should know about Google Apps from EDUCAUSE (March 2008)

So create an account OR login here and have fun experimenting!

Improvements to Google Docs

Read about improvements from the Office Google Blog which include an equation editor, super- and subscripts, translation features,and a "go to page" for surveys created.

"As interns on the Google Docs team this past summer, we were excited to be able to work on making Google Docs that much more useful for students like us. We've now added a bunch of back to school features which should help our fellow students make the transition from summer to school that much easier — and we hope they'll be useful to you non-students as well!"

Watch the video to learn how collaboration works in Google docs.

Google Docs now has a "Forms" Component

Check it out! I love it. Go to Google Docs and click on New --Form. You can create surveys, quizzes,etc. and when respondents hit "submit", the results go into an automatically generated spreadsheet. Very cool! We see many applications for library use such as gathering info on progress with projects, evaluation of projects, easily gathering what titles students have selected or are considering for Jr. Theme readings.

Learn how to create Google forms.