Thing 45 ~ Cloud Computing

I'm a huge fan of Google Docs! We use it daily in our school library media center to schedule classroom spaces and computer labs. In the beginning, there were definitely some problems setting up all of the accounts for the teachers, but once we figured out the bugs it's been great. I've had really great feedback from teachers and plan on using it again next year! To those interested in using it, be aware that there is a difference between an individual account and a team edition account. This is what gave us problems when setting things up. If you're aware of this before you begin, it should make things much easier.

Some of the advantages of using Google Docs for our scheduling:

• multiple people can view and edit at the same time
• revision history makes correcting mistakes a piece of cake
• people can edit any time or place
• you can upload documents
• automatically saves
• it's free

Some of the disadvantages:

• team edition can be confusing if the user already has a google docs account
• the email list feature didn't work properly so we had to copy and paste all the addresses

I also like all of the photography sites that keep a backup of all of your pics. I'd be devastated if I lost all of them and it's great to know they're backed up in several spots!