Google Docs

In the interest of full disclosure, I've been using Google Docs since about the beginning of the school year.  I had heard of it on one of my favorite podcasts (more info forthcoming during the podcast section of our programming), and saw a good deal of the potential. 

I haven't so much used it for student collaboration, since I have the usual questions about how can you tell when someone changes someone else's work.  However I have used it to post notes on line.  I've taken the notes that we create with the Smart Pen, turn them into a PDF file with the software that's included, then upload them to Google Docs.  I've figured out how to share this with everyone, then get the address to link to. 

This leads me to the next "Thing" (18.5?) that our 23 things doesn't mention.  It's a website called bit.ly.  This a website that shortens web addresses.  I took the Google Doc address, shortened it on bit.ly, rhen put the new address on my Twitter account.

An example that I used this for...  I have my students create a booklet of an element that they chose at random (together we all create a gigantic periodic table).  I created a rough draft on Powerpoint, then uploaded the rough draft to Google Docs.  It looks something like this... Google address: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0Aax5ynhBN1u9ZGd6ejlwejJfNThmemYyNTZkdw&hl=en ;    bit.ly address: bit.ly/HJvkw ;   .  I copied the bit.ly address to my Twitter account, then when we were in the computer lab, I just told the students to go to my Twitter feed and click on the address, then they could get going.  My future version of this (I think) is to make some sort of interactive Periodic Table with this, and link them all from a wiki maybe?