Thing 29 Google Tools

Overall, I really like Google tools; they've made many things in our media center easier this year. We use Google docs everyday at our school to sign up for space in the media center and computer labs. I've gotten some great feedback from staff. However, we definitely have had some bumps in the road. When I first set up the account, I didn't realize there were two ways of accessing the accounts. There is an account set up for our school , a team edition, and there could be accounts set up through Google. At first, it was really frustrating trying to figure out which account had been used. Luckily, there is a way to move your documents from one account to another. Also, sometimes staff never clicked on the invitation link and so they weren't granted permission to edit the site. Fortunately, this occurred with a small minority of the staff. Different people access it differently, but it is working for everyone now. I think I'll stick with it for next year simply because people really like it--when it works correctly! Our office conference rooms were recently added too. It's so much better than binders even if there were some kinks! I really like that multiple people can edit the document at one time; users can see who is editing at the same time as well. It's one of the reasons I picked Google Docs over a wiki.

Also, our special ed. department uses Google calendar to book IEP meetings; it has helped with booking too many IEPs in one day. Emails can be sent as reminders too.

I've just started using Google alerts, and I think students might really like setting them up as they do research projects. Our 9th graders do a current issues unit and this might really work well for them in addition to Google News. I like how Google News has a most popular tab as well as top news stories in other countries. I will still show students ProQuest and other databases, but I think it's a great tool to show them as well.