“There is something you should understand about the way I work.
When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay.
When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go.
It’s rather sad, really, but there it is. ”
–Nanny McPhee

A new semester, a new group of English students, new gmail accounts and the introduction of googledocs. Sometimes I think the hardest part of using googledocs with students is the whole username and password piece. I can empathize with my students as I personally struggle with keeping all my passwords straight.

So far my students have created accounts, created a document and started typing a paragraph into the document. There was only one student in my class that was familiar with googledocs so he was the person that was my display partner. It worked very well-he shared a document with me by adding my name to the document. He was at a computer to the left of me and I had my laptop connected to the smartboard so the class was able to see what I was doing. Students were amazed to see that googledocs has a sharing feature! My student and I opened up the side chat feature to converse online but that is ” not the real beauty” of googledocs–we then used the Insert Comment feature to correct a punctuation error. Students were able to see how I left a comment for their classmate and how he resolved the comment either by clicking resolve or replying back to me. It seemed to be a worthy class lesson and students were pretty excited to get to the computers and start typing out their paragraphs.

Over the weekend I received a few submissions of paragraphs so I am confident that those who did homework understand how to use googledocs. Sometimes students share documents with me but they do not use the FILE email collaborators feature and I never recieve their work. I am giving the other three quarters of my class the benefit of the doubt–I will assume they did homework over the weekend and did not email it to me. Tomorrow we will be on the computers again so I will be able to have everyone else share and send me their documents.

I am looking forward to editing their work in the next few days. I will definitely have to remind them that ctrl c and ctrl v are important features.