Google this!

In case you didn't know it, the University of Michigan is migrating its email and calendaring functions over to Google products, and in the bargain it is gaining a particular access to many of the Google apps some of us have grown to know and love: Docs, Sites, Blogger, Google+, and other things.

I've gotten myself involved in what it means to take advantage of these new things from the perspective of academic collaboration and teaching, and so I'm experimenting with some of the tools, with the (seemingly willing and definitely competent) participation of the students.

Here's an example. I wanted to involve the students in the creation of the rules of the game that governs us, and I wanted to do this in class. What better way of doing this than using a Google Doc word-processing document: you can have multiple contributors on it simultaneously, and you can display it to the whole class, too. Check out this quick video, shot on my phone and completely unedited (no Academy Awards this time!), but it shows how wonderfully thoughtfully students were able to work on a single document at the same time (while seeing it on the big screen in the classroom). In case it's not clear, there are thirty-two viewers on the document and about a dozen real-time contributors, all in the same room. Pretty cool, huh?