Weekly Report & Reflection - Week 7

Welcome back everyone, 

Well to start off I don't know about some of you, but this week using Google Docs it was my first time exploring this tool. Of course I had heard of the tool, but I had never used it personally the only experience I had with it was watching someone else who knew what they were doing quickly navigate to where they needed to be. After spending some time working through and trying things out for myself I found that it was pretty easy to navigate through and that there are multiple different features available

Tomlinson, A. (CC) 2016

that make group projects that much easier. I think that having this tool is going to make working in a group a lot easier because before I knew how to use Google Docs I would usually just email or Facebook the document, presentation, etc. to the other person/people that I was working with. So I like the fact that you are able to all access the document/presentation and make changes and I or the others would instantly be able to see the changes that were made. I think that one way this could be used in the classroom would be that the students would be able to work on a presentation together from different computers and all be working on it at the same time. Another way would be that students are able to type up for example let's say a short story they had to write and they would be able to share it with the teacher, instead of having to print it out and hand it in. A third way that this could be used is in a work setting, for example let's say something is creating a set of instructions for something and as time goes by one step changes and the original person who created the ddocument is not there anymore, this allows other to go in and add, remove and change the document. This has helped me build my knowledge about working collaboratively because now that I have this tool, I will feel better about doing group work and working with others just because of how easy it is. This has helped me learn to be a better digital citizen because I am able to see how these tools are meant to help us and that the digital world it makes it easier for everyone to share ideas, etc.   

When it comes to my PLE I think that Google Docs would for sure be something that I would add to it. I think that it would go great in the collaborative and organize sections because these are both big contributors to how Google Docs works. I don't think that I will be removing any of the tools we have learned about from my PLE just because I find that they are all useful to me in some sense and that I want to continue to learn about them and pass them on to others.  

One article that I found on my Feedly account this week is actually one that relates to the topic of Google Docs for this week. The article mentions how there is a new feature that is voice talk. This article about Voice Feature mentions how there is now the tool for people to talk into the program and it will type what you have said. I think that this is great for children that are not able to write quite yet, this allows them to be able to still do some work without having to write anything because the program will do it for them. At the same time I think this could also prevent children from learning to write/type and in a sense make them lazy because that way they don't have to spell anything or physically type it out. I just thought that this was an interesting piece that related to this weeks topic, and it could potentially be a feature others didn't know about.

Until next time,
Amanda :)