Thing 16 - Explore online collaboration with Google Docs

How might you use this tool in your personal and professional life? What issues come to mind about using this tool with students (ie, they need email addresses to log-in)?
I can see this application coming in handy when I am working on a document with colleagues. Depending upon the number of people who need to edit (put their own stamp on). A project, this would reduce the amount of e-mail copies and versions going back and forth between the principle parties. This could be used with parents as well, however. At this time, I am unsure of any situations where this would be needed. This really has great application for any sort of collaborative project between individuals separated physically by location.

As far as using this with students, I am always reticent, giving very young students are powerful tools to use, such as e-mail. Our districts acceptable use policy does not allow for elementary, and to the best of my knowledge middle school, students to have e-mail accounts. If we wanted to use this application, you had to find a way beyond the AUP. That could entail setting up some sort of proxy or having parents sign up for up individual e-mail accounts that their child could use. Doing this would mean that the controls would be off and the students would have the expectation of conducting themselves in an appropriate manner having an email account. I'm not sure that I'm ready for that to happen.

I am disappointed in the facts of that uploaded files do not retain the formatting from the original document. Uploading a document which had a table filling the page found that same table spread in unusable format, which would have required me to spend a lot of time redoing. Even after I downloaded a document from Google Docs as a Word file, I still had to spend some time cleaning up the formatting in my Word document. Does Google wish us to start, finish and manage our documents solely within Google Docs?

Having that said, this is a powerful tool to having your disposal, especially when interacting with colleagues or parents.