Weekly Report & Reflection Post #7

Welcome back!

It has been awhile since I have posted because last week was Reading Week! It went by so fast, but its also nice to be back. This term is flying by; I can’t believe second year is almost done.

Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/googledocs

This week we were introduced to two tools: Google Docs and TodaysMeet. TodaysMeet is a tool to talk online with a group for presentations. Google Docs is a tool that allows many people to edit and view a document at the same time over the Internet. You are able to view what others have contributed to the document and changes that have been made. This tool is excellent for group projects. In university it is no surprise that we are all very busy and it can be difficult to coordinate a time that everyone can meet, this way everyone can work on the document at different times, in different locations, without anyone missing out on what is going on.  You can make documents, slideshows, spreadsheets, and drawings. This is the first example of one of the ways Google Docs can be used. Next, it can serve as a substitute for Office Suites, or Microsoft   I found that working on Google Docs in conjunction with TodaysMeet was a good combination of tools to work digitally with my partner for the project easy. We were able to communicate through TodaysMeet on ideas we had for our presentation, and able to demonstrate these ideas through Google Docs in the Slides component. I found this almost more easy than collaborating in person!

Word. These applications must be purchased and are very expensive, whereas Google Docs has many of the capabilities of these programs, and is free! Thirdly, my favourite feature of this tool is that IT AUTOMATICALLY SAVES! This is amazing so you never have to worry about losing any work you have done.

I will definitely be adding Google Docs to my PLE, that I created in Week #2, within the educational section. I am very surprised I did not include it on there in the first place, as I have been using it for years! I will most likely not be adding TodaysMeet to my PLE due to the fact that in today’s digital society we already possess so many tools for communication such as texting, iMessage, email, and Facebook messenger.

Article of the Week

I found an article on Feedly about Google Docs called Forget Keyboards: We Dictated This Story on Google Docs, which is fitting as it was the focus of this week’s exploration. Google Docs has introduced a voice-dictation tool on its app. I use voice dictation to send iMessages and text messages to my friends on my iPhone and I love it. I find it much faster than typing and I think that it aids me with my train of thought because when I type I sometimes forget what I was trying to get across. I also believe that this will be amazing for disabled users, making the digital world even more inclusive.

Until Next Week!