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GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom

June 14, 2011, 3:00 pm

By George Williams

Last month, I taught a course on professional writing. (I know, right? I’m having a very decadent summer, thank you very much.)

The students’ final assignment was to collaborate in small groups on a business proposal in which they were to identify, analyze, and then propose a solution for a problem of their own choosing. Ideally a local–upstate South Carolina–and current problem.

Most written assignments in college are written by a single author. In a work environment, by contrast, collaboratively-authored documents are much more common. And two of the worst parts of collaboration are the difficulty of getting all of the collaborators together for a meeting (something I’ve written about before) and coordinating who has the most authoritative version of a collaboratively-authored document (something Jason has written about before). There are online solutions to both of these problems.

After making the above points in a very brief lecture that included examples of various kinds of collaborative workplace writing, I assigned the following ProfHacker posts as reading:

  • “Writers’ Bootcamp: Writing Collaboratively,” by Billie Hara: We all know how difficult writing can be if we are working by ourselves. However, if we work together, perhaps the work isn’t quite as difficult.
  • “Getting Your Work Done With Social Media: the Sprint,” by Jason B. Jones: Social medial tools like Facebook and Twitter can help get you through your to-do list, instead of distracting you from it. Here’s a simple strategy for breaking out of procrastination.
  • “Online Tools For Collaboration,” by George H. Williams: Collaborating with others on large and ongoing projects can be tricky, but it’s much easier if you use a few online tools wisely.
  • “E-mail Is Not a Tool for Revision,” by Jason B. Jones: Using an online writing environment–such as GoogleDocs or a wiki–makes collaboration easier and side steps the problems that can arise when several authors are e-mailing each other different drafts of the same document
  • “A Simple Hack for Productive Collaborative Authorship,” by George H. Williams: If you and your collaborators need to make significant progress on a document in a short period of time, here’s one way to do it.
  • “Use GoogleDocs for Crowd-Sourced Notes,” by George H. Williams: When several different people are taking notes about the same topic, using a shared online document is an effective way to keep track of all of the different contributions.
  • “Google’s Cloud Connect Links Microsoft Office and GoogleDocs Together,” by Cory Bohon: This new, Windows-only plug-in from Google Docs allows you to share, back up, and edit simultaneously with others who are also using the plug-in with Office or who are using Google Docs in the cloud.

I decided to strongly suggest that the students use GoogleDocs (about which we’ve written a great deal here at ProfHacker) as the writing and editing tool for their proposals. The result? Everyone (myself included) was very happy.

The students reported that they found the GoogleDocs environment very easy to use and very helpful. I provide them with a sort of template for the document they were to create, and they just filled in the various sections. (Keep in mind, though, that “just filled in” doesn’t capture the significant work the students did in researching the problems they were addressing and crafting the documents responding to those problems.) All in all, a success.

[As always, you should be mindful of the stability and security of the cloud when using online services like this.]

How about you? Have you tried GoogleDocs in the classroom for collaboratively-authored projects? If so, how did it go? Let’s hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Christopher Schmidt]

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  • goxewu

    * There are “vast area[s] of human experience” (slavery, prostitution) to which one might also say no thanks, even though there are interesting arguments (“the natural slave,” “sex workers”) to be made in their favor under certain circumstances.

    * Again, I’m not an atheist to the extent that I want to close down churches or send priests underground. Subjecting the obviously for-profit enterprises that so many religious outlets (e.g., Joel Osteen’s largest single church in America) are to taxation is, however, something I’d favor. In this country at the present time, and in recent history, the practice of, and public favors granted to, religion discriminates far more against atheists than atheists–even “New Atheists” and their relatively few intemperate spokespersons and books–do against religion.

    * I’m impressed that mavprof has internalized the complex and contradictory work of Emil Cioran (it’s too confusing for me) enough to produce a casual anecdote about a friend of his and Buddhism. But (I want to say “of course,” as I do with many of mavprof’s putative points), the story assumes–as lawyers say–what is being argued: the existence of “the supreme happiness.” (The definite article is the giveaway.) I remember LSD trippers in the ’60s saying more or less the same thing to friends who declined to lick the back of the stamp.

    * “I incline to the fustian, foreign phrase, and Teutonic hypotaxis and parenthesis just to wind them up a bit.” I admit that I overlooked that particular possible reason for mavprof’s foreign phrases: He’s doing it just to get his disputants’ goats. Besides being an adult’s version of a little kid’s “I was only doing it to get you mad,” it seems somewhat contradictory for mavprof to complain about the…what shall we call it?…harshness of his detractors’ criticism of religion and then to try to egg on that very same quality in them.

    * All of the above is, however, just good clean fun. What still lies unrefuted on the table is the (to me) social fact that the public face of Christianity in America is now predominantly that of politically conservative fundamentalism. And the cause, as I see it, neither a conspiracy or a “hijack,” but rather the inevitable appeal–especially on the street, in religious matters–of simplistic, bumpersticker slogans.

  • glenntwo

    This set of links is fabulous–thanks! And the question is really interesting. I’d be curious to hear people’s comments on  the relative merits of Google Docs vs. wikis for teaching collaborative writing skills. I’ve now several times used a wiki that I helped develop alongside a book I co-edited, and have assigned both small-group collaborative writing and (still more adventurously) required that an entire class group of 16 collaboratively produce an essay about a keyword that has run through the semester’s readings. But I’ve never tried Google Docs.

    I hope that’s a productive supplementary question; I don’t mean to hijack the discussion here.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    What a great site!

    That’s a good question about GoogleDocs versus wikis. In my opinion, there are several things that give gDocs the advantage over a wiki:

    1. Simultaneous editing and viewing: Each collaborator can see what the others are doing as they are doing it. This cuts down significantly on version control problems.
    2. Real-time onscreen chat among collaborators.
    3. Google Docs discussions (about which Amy has written before): threaded discussions in marginal comments.

    What I miss about a wiki, however, are the built-in organizational features: tagging and automatic linking and such. I think that GoogleDocs is great for collaborative, real-time composing and editing, but wikis have the advantage when it comes to publishing the finished product.

  • kbeery

    I used Googledocs almost exclusively this year for my students’ work.  My goal is to prepare my students to be successful in college and/or the work world.  Students worked harder and were much more likely to edit and revise their work using Googledocs.  They loved the ability to collaborate and their writing was exponentially better at the end of the year than it had been in September. 

  • http://twitter.com/HelloMsRitter Katie Ritter

    I never used Google docs in the classroom, but I have recently had a lot of experience with it.  I’m in the process of starting up a blog/website with two other people. We’ve used Google docs to keep track of which post has been written, where it is in the editing process, and when it’s ready to be published.  We’ve all been thrilled with the results!  I like the fact that you can see who else is viewing the document at the same time.

    Although I’m not teaching, I do have a degree in education.  I think using Google docs in the classroom is a great idea for students in this online, internet, social media era.  Great idea!

  • http://www.facebook.com/freesunny Elena Kuznetsova

    Hello,

    I’m a recent business operations management graduate and all 8 courses we had each term always included a lot of team work. Teamwork was the way to handle very intensive workload in school. I have been teaching my classmates how to use google docs for the past 2 years of our program. It’s been a total success for us as we created document structures for multiple projects we were working on, each final report was written with my team members in Google Docs. Our class even went further and started a collaborative document where everyone was making notes during the lectures for one course. At the end of the course we had all the notes in one place, which we used to study for final exam. Collaboration is a future of education and Google has created great tools for students.

    Elena

  • http://twitter.com/fotografiskt Lasse Keybets

    Hm!

  • sgregurek

    In May, Google donated 30 of their new Chrome mini laptops to my classroom.  Our end of the year project in my 8th grade classroom was done with Google Docs on the internet computers.  It was such an amazing experience!  The students shared their document with me at the same time they made their header, then I could keep up with their progress and determine easily if plagiarism was taking place.  Between the chats, discussions and my notes on their document, their finished products were amazingly perfect!  They were so proud of their work and could not wait to get to work each day in the classroom.  I believe Google Docs will be the greatest revolution in education in the future!  It brings students and teachers together as a complete learning community.
     

  • http://twitter.com/rich_rowley Rich Rowley

    Moved our school over to Apps at the end of 2009 – lots of really useful tools including Docs

  • danburkemt
  • http://twitter.com/millefeuillejo energy bar

    Couldn’t  agree more

  • http://easegill.wordpress.com/ Nigel Robertson

    Strawman argument – the article refs Google Apps but describes Google Mail as having an accessibility problem. This post is about Google Docs and your Chronic article doesn’t address that.

  • http://www.leadwell.com.au/blog Mike Reading

    I love Google docs in the classroom. Great way to increase student engagement!

  • danquigs

    Great post. I teach a professional writing course online at NYiT. The real advantage of google docs here is that, like many universities around the country, NYiT has adopted the google apps for education suite. That means all my students have their docs link already set up …sits right on their email. Sharig then becomes simple…students don’t have to set up accounts or gather emails from different services.

    Quig

  • http://twitter.com/betakarel Karel Hermans

    voor iedereen die met ICT en Onderwijs werkt. Vooral sectie NED van #HP #helenparkhurst kan over digitaal schrijfonderwijs hier ideeën opdoen. @nooitvervelend:disqus

  • liveyourlife

    This will be the motif for the next NJ reality show…guaranteed.

  • http://twitter.com/literarychica Liana Silva

    I love the idea of using Google docs for collaboration. But the times I’ve suggested using them, the same question always pops up in the conversation: but what about those who don’t have Google accounts and don’t want to create one just for the assignment/task? Any suggestions

  • changinggears

    I recently tried Google Docs after reading several articles about how great it is and how easy it makes collaboration outside of the classroom.  Unfortunately, my junior-level college students found it to be unwieldy and riddled with log-in and accessibility problems.  This totally baffled me, as I had found it very easy to work with and very intuitive in terms of accessing and editing documents.  But I had several students who experienced legitimate log in and access problems and the whole class was left with a negative opinion about the tool, which is unfortunate as the majority of them are secondary ed. majors and will probably never want to use Google Docs in their own classrooms as a result.  I really expected to have better success with it and I’m baffled by their resonse and the difficulty they had with it, especially considering their adeptness at using Facebook and other social media tools, which seem far more complicated than Google Docs to me.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    I think the first time students encounter any new technology it takes them a little while to get used to it. After the initial learning stage, however, things get easier for them. Check out Amy Cavender’s “Encouraging Students’ Digital Problem Solving Skills.”

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