A CALL tool that we have not investigated in class but that has been coming in handy for class collaborations towards the end of this semester has been Google Documents. I am enrolled in seventeen hours this semester of courses, and I work at UIC. It has been very challenging to meet with my fellow classmates to work on collaborative projects. In most cases, we have spent twenty minutes dividing up the work that needs to be done, and then we start a google document and add all group members as collaborators on the document. Next, each person is responsible for a section in the document, which they develop on their own according to the standards that the group sets in the initial meeting.
As long as guidelines can be agreed upon efficiently at the early stage of the project, the Google Document takes a lot of the issues regarding meeting times and typical group 'storming' behavior our of the equation because all members can work individually towards achieving group goals. All of the project presentations that I have had to do this semester using Google Documents this semester have run very smoothy, and they tend to keep strict organization to the flow of the presentation because everyone knows what his or her duty is. I have not encountered an experience where more than one person is attempting to edit the document at the same time, so I am not sure if there is a potential for loss of material etc. The ease of collaborating using Google Documents is probably also facilitated be the general cohesiveness of our cohort; we seem to get on the same wavelength easily and all want to take the fastest route towards meeting our program requirements, so these are probably also important factors to contribute to the successfulness of using Google Documents.
No comments:
Post a Comment