ONLINE COLLABORATIVE TOOL: Google Document 📖📝
What’s
up Joyers? 👋😄 How are you lately?😁
Anyway,
thank you for having me again here. Today, I wanna share a tool which will be
very beneficial for you since it can help you to work together with others
through internet. Thus, this thing is called an online collaborative tool. To
be precise, the tool I wanna bring up is called “Google Document”.
Talking about Google Document, I am quite familiar with it because I’ve been using it for about two years. For exact, I started using it since my first semester in college. So, let’s get to know it!
Google
Document, also called as Google Docs, is an
online word processor which is provided by Google that enables us to create
documents and work with other people. It was released in 2006. You can access it by going to your Google
Drive. You can create Google account first and log in to that Drive with your
Google account. Moreover, a tip from me, you may create a folder in your Google
Drive and create the Google Document file in it by clicking your mouse’s right
button, so it will be organized and easy for you to search any file you want.
Its features are more or
less similar to Microsoft Word as it has a complete toolbar containing several
elements like “bold”, “italic”, “font”, “font-size”, “page and numbering”,
“highlight colour”, “font colour”, “image” inserting, “page breaking”, etc.
Thus, you can write anything, add some photos, or even add links by directly
copying and pasting the link you want or clicking “insert link” (ctrl + K)
there.
Moreover, now let’s discuss its benefits and drawbacks. About its benefits, this tool can definitely be a platform for you to do a writing task in teamwork because you can share the document’s link to your colleagues and make it editable for them.
Actually, there are three choices for sharing your file. First, you can make it as a private file meaning that you are the only one who can access the file. Second, you can make it to be accessible to people in your institution like when your email is managed by an institution. In my case, my email is organized by Widya Mandala Surabaya Catholic University, so my colleagues using the email from the similar institution can open the file too as long as they get the link or we can make the file to be accessible when it is searched. Third, you can make it to be accessible for anyone who gets the link and is connected to the internet. Furthermore, for the file editing, people have three (3) choices: viewer, commentator, and editor meaning that people who can access the file can view the file, comment on the file, or edit the file. You can also share the link of your file through email, so only people with whom you share the link on email with are the ones who can access it and you can notice their respective contribution to the file.
Furthermore, it also provides quite comprehensive writing elements features like Microsoft Word. Lastly, but most importantly, you can use it for free.
On the other hand, this
tool is also not perfect since it has two weaknesses. The first one is that you
will need an internet connection to edit it and see the instant change. It
requires you to open your browser to access the Google Drive and get your file
to edit it and see the instant editing result. However, there is also a feature
to make the file “available offline”. You can use this for others to be able to
open your file through a link, but still although the file is editable, the
result of the editing that your colleagues made when offline can’t be shown as
long as their device is still offline. Then, after their device gets connected
to the internet again, the change can appear. In my opinion, it truly can
hamper one’s collaborative work progress especially when an instant change or
result is needed. The second drawback is that we can’t draw on Google Documents,
so we can’t add our own hand-drawn and coloured notes or handwritten digital
note to it, but still, we can add images from our computer memory or copying
and pasting from pictures available on Google.
Besides that, to give you a clearer example, I’ll give you an example of how you can integrate Google Document with your lesson. Simply, you can use this tool when you want to give a collaborative writing activity for your students. Say that you are teaching English for 9th junior high school graders. You can put your students into groups consisting 3-4 people. Then, teach or introduce them to Google Document. At least, you need to make sure that your students know how to use this tool. Subsequently, ask the group to create a narrative text of 250-300 words collaboratively by using Google Document. Therefore, they have to discuss as well as decide the topic, characters, and plot. After the discussion and after they get the fixed plan, each may contribute one paragraph to construct the story.
References:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/7068618?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
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