learning all i can

I love, love, love the idea of Google Docs. How wonderful to be able to upload files and view them/work on them from anywhere! I can see so much potential for this. One example that immediately springs to mind is exams. Every semester, our department works on and edits old exams, and the amount of documents I end up with in my email inbox is ridiculous. This will take care of that and will be incredibly helpful. I found uploading files really simple, too. I also created a word document - a test for my 8th grade on the Vietnam War. Interestingly, I found that a bit more difficult to work with. When I printed from the Google Docs page it was a disaster - nothing lined up well at all. And when I copied it into a Word document, I still had to clean up the formatting a bit, but still this is an incredibly helpful tool.

It will be helpful too when you want to start something here at school and then work on it elsewhere, but you don’t want to use a thumb drive or you just want to be sure it is “out there” then why not upload it to Google Docs and there it will be. I absolutely loved the “form” document that is able to be created. I can think of many many uses including surveys of department members, students, etc. That is probably one of the uses I’m most excited about. In fact, I created one for this course to give Shelley feedback (as if she doesn’t get enough from reading all of these blogs!!) I sent it by gmail to several class members, but here it is if you’re interested: k12learning20 survey.

On a completely different note, when I worked on Thing 19 and embedded my you Tube video, it completely changed the face of my edublog. It moved all of my sidebars to the bottom and changed the layout of earlier posts. I have spent countless hours on the edublogs home page and gone back through our class instructions and cannot seem to figure out how to correct that. (I did add a voki though, but I wish I could make it a side bar/widget and not a post but oh well, I learned a lot.) If anyone has any advice on how to fix that I would really appreciate it. (Sorry for the distraction from thing 20…)