Google Docs & Fare Thee Well

I have heard a great deal about Google Docs over the course of the last year and am eager to get in there and see what it can do. To give it a go, I am writing this post using Google Docs which, it seems, is capable of posting directly to my blog. I will admit that I am skeptical about this as even within Blogger I have had issues with formatting, particularly with pictures. So let's try that out with a picture I took while attending a conference in Washington DC last week. Not bad! I can change the resolution, change the image's alignment, etc. after inserting. Very nice compared to the editor on Blogger.


To thoroughly test out the functionality of Google Docs, I also tested the Spreadsheet application and it seems to have all of the functionality of Microsoft Excel. It has a a VERY FULL compliment of functions available for use in formulas and like the word processor and presentation application is capable of importing and exporting to Microsoft Office formats.

How will I use Google Docs you ask? Well, I can envision a number of applications related to both my teaching and non-teaching activities. Given the audience, I'll focus here on those related to teaching. The single biggest application that I see is in facilitating group work where students need to collaborate on an assignment. One of the biggest complaints that I get from students in my first year Design and Communications course (in which everything is group work) is that they struggle with combining documents, e-mail attachments, etc. I think that Google Docs may help alleviate their frustration and make them more productive. The formatting and other tools that are available are quite limited as compared to something like Microsoft Word. I believe that this will be difficult for Google Docs to compete with. I know that for some of the more complicated reports that I work on which use templates, styles, automatic tables of contents and figures, embedded spreadsheets and graphs Google Docs doesn't stand a chance. I don't think though that that will render it useless. I see the advantage being in the ability to collaborate on documents on-line as the real focus. Even for more complicated documents, Google Docs can provide for initial drafts where content is really the focus of the work. Formatting and final layout can be handled elsewhere once most of the collaborative work is done. It is in this way that I see my students using this tool. (Sidebar: It has been reported that the new version of Microsoft Office will have the ability to share much like Google Docs)

Final verdict: Big thumbs up for Google Docs

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So it looks like I have reached the last activity for Web 2.0: Your Web - Your Way. I have to admit, I am a little sad to be leaving the comfortable world of planned activities. Particularly the guided introduction to the good, popular and useful tools that exist on the WWW. Time to forge ahead on my own. Well, not quite. I think a community has developed around this project. A "Learning Network" that will enable me to continue to learn about technologies that I can use in my teaching. I am very grateful to our fearless leaders for developing this course and wish to congratulate you on a job very well done. Thank you.

If you have become a fan of Dark Matter (I think there are two of you), fear not! I believe that blogging has become a part of my life, not just my "on-line" life. I hope to continue posting things that I find interesting and useful.

As always, thanks for reading and please comment.

Word Map Me Will Ya?

A quick post today about something I find really neat: word maps.


Wordle is a neat little tool for constructing word maps, or clouds, from text, blogs or Delicious tags. From the main page click on "Create" and then feed it some text. Once you've got that in, you can play with the layout. The result of running Wordle on my blog is shown above and the result from my thesis is shown below.


Pulling results out for use is a bit problematic as you have to do a screen capture but, all in all, worth the hassle. Run it on some of your text and see what it can do for you!

Leave a comment to let me know if you like these posts and/or find them useful.

Thanks for reading!

What the tweet is going on?, My head is in the clouds & My online presence

So, what’s with the title you ask? Well, lots to talk about this week as I tackle a posting on Twitter and reflect on my trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Blackboard World 2009. (HUGE THANK YOU TO MARY!!!) Follow this link to see some pictures.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news at all lately, you’ll know that Twitter has revolutionized the way that the world learns about news 140 characters at a time. I was fortunate enough to listen to a keynote presentation this morning while attending Blackboard World 2009 in Washington, D.C. by Lester Holt of NBC News. (That's him in the picture.) It was interesting to hear him, a professional and very accomplished journalist talk about how Twitter and other web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing the way that news is reported. Along with the immediacy of the conveyance of information though comes the question of credibility. Anyone can now publish information to the whole world with just a few clicks of a mouse or keystrokes on a cell phone. Just recently, the new iPhone can publish video directly to YouTube and has increased the number of uploads tremendously. Incredible. What used to take a team of professional journalists and millions of dollars of equipment can now be accomplished with a cell phone.

One of the things that I really like about Twitter is that I can follow people who post things that I am interested in like technology, teaching, etc. I can also get help quickly too by posting what I want help with and getting responses from people. BTW - Thanks Sue. I also really like the ability to see what people are ‘tweeting’ about. In fact, I have even added a gadget to my webpage that displays a cloud of the most popular hashtags (the subjects) being used on Twitter. I personally find this fascinating. It allows me to see what people on Twitter are talking about. The recent election in Iran is a prime example of how this can be used and would be really useful in a lot of areas in education.

A powerful tool that anyone interested in using Twitter should investigate is a free piece of software called Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck allows you to organize the plethora of information that is available to you. It also allows you to perform searches on hashtags, manage multiple accounts, organize the people you are following, etc.

So, what do I think of Twitter? Well, for me, I think that I may use Twitter for having a work-related online presence and for following topics that I am interested in related to professional development. My personal web 2.0 tool of choice is Facebook. It does everything that I look for with regards to online social networking with family and friends. My policy regarding students, and I tell them during my first class, is that I use Facebook for my personal life and that I am sure they don’t want to look at pictures of my kids nor do they want to know if I won my chess game against my friend from Halifax. The flipside of that is that I don’t want to know about their personal lives either. I am not interested in which vegetable they are most like, what country they are most suited to living in or how hard they are finding school (yet they publish photos from their weekend escapades). To satisfy students’ desire to have a more personal digital connection with me, I point them to my website by placing a link right in the navigation of my Blackboard course. On my website I have a brief CV, links to my publications, my schedule (updated and sync’d with Outlook and my iPod real-time by Google Calendar…very cool), articles that I share from Google Reader as well as this blog. All things that, though they pertain specifically to me, constitute my professional online presence.

Picasso...I mean Picasa!!!

Another Google favourite has emerged for me: Picasa. Picasa is a FREE tool from Google for managing your photos and doing simple edits like the one shown on the leftt. (see the origial below) In this particular case I was able to tune the light to make it a bit warmer, add a soft focus to blur the edges a bit and crop out the unwanted portions of the picture. All in only a few easy clicks. Picasa also has a few neat little tools for doing automatic fixes, suggesting crops, etc. It can also make simple movies, posters and collages, can do geo-tagging and makes it easy to share your pictures via e-mail, Blogger and offers a photo sharing site similar to Flickr.

Here's an example of the automatic cropping. The first image is the original while the other was a suggestion from Picasa.

All in all, for simple edits, I give this one a huge thumbs up!!!