Sara Calhoun Davis, Ph. D.
Associate Dean, Education, Health, and Human Performance
Director, Center for Faculty Development <www.cofc.edu/~cfd>

Beth Goodier uses Google Docs and Spreadsheets to enhance her teaching and encouraged me to send out something about the value of this interactive medium. Last week, I attended Mendi Benigni’s (TLT) workshop for us education folks about the same topic, and was amazed at the feedback and collaboration opportunities available with Google Docs. What a boon for teachers!

Wikipedia says, “Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be created within the application itself, imported through the web interface, or sent via email.  They can also be saved to the user’s computer in a variety of formats. By default, they are saved to Google’s servers. Open documents are automatically saved to prevent data loss. Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.Collaboration between users is also a feature of Google Docs. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time.” Important for your classroom is that you can track student work (who did it, who did the most work, when they did it) on group projects and papers; changes are labeled by time and person changing the text. You’ll have fun with this one! Good teaching,

Here are some highlights.

• This YouTube video explains the conceptual framework of Google Docs (www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA)
• http://docs.google.com/is the website to get you started once you know where you’re going with Google Docs and want to practice.

We are in the 5th week of the 10 weeks of Recyclemania, a nationwide recycling competition amongst colleges and universities.

Recycling on campus is a work in progress — Visit the Sustainability Web Site http://www.cofc.edu/sustainable/

Visit the Recycling Web site at http://www.cofc.edu/~recycling/ to get involved!