This week I have been asked to review a free web-based office suite. I chose Google Docs because I personally think Google is pretty okay. (Yes, they have more data on me than even Facebook does, but a company with the motto of "Don't be evil." in this day and age says a lot to me.)
It turns out, though, that I couldn't review "Google Docs" because they got rid of that name by incorporating it into Google Drive. Google Drive gives you five gigabytes of storage for free. Why? Because they can, that's why.
"Well, what good is that, though?" a skeptic might ask. "Even my laptop, which is getting pretty old in terms of hardware, has a 220+ gigabyte hard drive." Can you access a file on your laptop when you're fifty miles away from it, skeptic? Or even when you're three miles away from it? No? I didn't think so. However, if you had uploaded that file onto Google Drive, you would be able to access it. Quit being a skeptic and get with the times. Jeez. Addtionally, you can purchase more storage, 25GB, 100GB, up to 16 Terrabytes(!) for a monthly fee. Furthermore, Google Docs formats don't add to your total storage.
Anyway, the Google Docs portion: Microsoft Office is the industry standard office suite. Among those programs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the most used. They are well written, powerful programs with tons of features. Here's the thing, though: most of those features are not utilized (and indeed, don't need to be utilized) most of the time. Google Drive lets you make documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It allows you to export them in Microsoft Office format, OpenOffice format, or other formats. (A quick note: we were specifically asked not to review OpenOffice for this assignment. I'm assuming that was because OpenOffice is a download, not web-based. However, it was highly recommended by our instructor, and I can second that recommendation as someone who has used OpenOffice for years. Like Google Drive, it's a free alternative to Microsoft Office.) The programs have nowhere near the amount of features that Microsoft Office formats have, but they have most of the features that one would need most of the time.
They also have something that I was introduced to this school year that Microsoft Office does not: built in collaboration. Let me set the scenario where I learned about this. We have a problem that most high schools have. Many kids require validation from their friends so frequently that they allow their cell phones to interfere with their classroom performance. Like many schools, because of concerns of cyber bullying, disengagement, etc., we have a no cell phone policy. The first time a teacher sees a student's cell phone in class, they get a warning. The second time, the teacher asks for it, and the teacher will hold it for the remainder of the hour (or the student can take his or her phone to the office for the remainder of the day). We didn't want to create a time-consuming ODR (office discipline referral) every time a student had his or her phone confiscated by a teacher, but we wanted to create a record of when it happened.
The answer, for us, was with a Google Drive Spreadsheet. A spreadsheet was created, and all of the teachers were given permission to edit the document. Teachers can even edit the document simultaneously. Whenever a student's phone was confiscated, the teacher added the date and class period when it happened after his or her name. That way, we had a record of which students frequently had their phones confiscated.
Furthermore, this allowed us to see which teachers did and which teachers did not confiscate phones. In a Google Doc, you have the option to "See revision history" under the File menu. This option shows which contributors of the document made which changes and when - in our case, which teachers recorded the confiscation of phones.
One final note: I tried playing with creating a "Form" on Google Drive. The problem I ran into was that when I tried to open it again, it opened as a spreadsheet. Perhaps I am doing something wrong, or perhaps Google still has some kinks to work out on the Form option. However, it looked like an easy way to create a test or a survey for students (or anybody) to take.
Did I mention it's free? It's free.
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