Serendipity Webinar Overview – GoogleDocs With Students

Introduction

As usual our Edublogs Serendipity session was recorded and is a great example of Serendipity in action. As often seems to be the case we had an initial tie for the topic but a second poll resolved this into the topic of “Using Google Docs”. Luckily for us we had Rachael Colley @burntsugar with us. Rachael uses Google Docs all the time with her students and is very knowledgable about them.

The Session

Rachael gave us a brilliant impromptu introduction to some of the features of Google Docs through a unique blend of Application Share on Elluminate and creating a Google document and sharing the link with us for us to “play”with a live document. Catch the recording to see how this worked.

GDocPic

This was very effective for several reasons including:

  • it didn’t matter if people joined the session after Rachael had shared the link or couldn’t access the document themeselves for any reason as they could still see anything typed in by the rest of us
  • it was possible for Rachael to indicate/demonstrate features/tools on the App Share so that we could see where they were and how they worked.

Rachael told us briefly about how she uses GoogleDocs with her students & how she and they experiment together.

Conclusion

In the very short time available Rachael whetted our appetites for more and I hope she will soon be coming along to do a whole Fine Focus session for us on Google Docs. Watch this space!

Next Week

TalkTime smallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session a “Talk Time”  session on “Twitter – rules or ground rules?” There are differing ideas on how Twitter is/should be used, what is “allowed” or “acceptable” or “unacceptable” behaviour. We would love your perspective on this for our discussion this week.

Join us on Thursday Aug 12th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 13th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.