Module 3

Greetings web-buddies! and farewell USB flash drive!
I loved this module. Goodbye to my USB flash drive! I wish I knew about this during my uni days when working on group assignments. I would have sent the link to my lecturer so that they can get a realistic idea of the group collaboration! HA!
The person who creates the "in plain English" series is a genius. This is something you can use in the classroom to teach kids about Web 2.0 tools. The Google Docs in Plain English easily explained how the application works. It made me fall in love immediately. Gone will be the days that the humble USB is mourned over when it 'runs away' from you. Perfect! I think Google Docs is something I may introduce to my team teachers when we do collaborative planning. It will put new meaning into the idea of collaborative planning as we can all access and see the same document without the editing restrictions that are present in Microsoft Word. While playing around I discovered something that I really want to let everyone know about. You can click and drag images from one web browser into your document! Yes! Open and re-size browser with the required image so that it sits next to the Google Docs browser and just click and drag the image over! AMAZING! No more copying and pasting! What ease!
The American school teachers from the next video, Teachers and Principals Talk about Google Docs, made me see how valuable the application is to these teachers. In the stone age, there was the most-cherished 3.5" floppy disk. (I strongly disliked these and cheered at the hostile takeover of the USB flash drive that obliterated their existence.) While in high school, I began writing a novel to fill in the time before school, as I was at school so early. Unfortunately, five chapters into my book, I forgot to pass my disk around the library security guard (the gates that beep if you try to take a book without accessioning it!) and my disk was wiped by the magnetic field that surrounds it. Goodbye novel. Numerous times this happened to those I knew and caused much stressing as ENTIRE assignments were lost as the only copy was on that single disk. I believe Google Docs will then cause much stressing for students, who will need to build a new repertoire of excuses to explain why their assignments have not been done. The excuses "my disk was wiped", "my USB won't read", and, my favourite, "my computer crashed" will become obsolete. Oh dear! The poor darlings!

Until next time!
A