Sharing online presentations with Google Documents

At St. Olaf this year, we have been using Google Docs to create shared documents for planning  departmental events, for documenting student attendance at homework help sessions, and for making lesson plans.  Once a document is created, it can be shared with any number of people, who can then either just view it or participate in the editing. It's an effective way to work collaboratively, and it also creates a record that everyone can view in future years.  I wish we had been able to create documents in such a way when we were working on our textbook project.  It was inconvenient to send Word documents back and forth to one another and to keep track of the multiple versions of each document on our computers.

In addition to documents, it is also possible to create spreadsheets and presentations with Google Docs.  I haven't tried to create a spreadsheet yet, but at the CILA tech poster session last week, one of the faculty members demonstrated how spreadsheets could be used for scheduling appointments with students.  The faculty person makes the schedule in a Google spreadsheet, and then shares it with a group of students who can access the document and sign up for a time.  If a student misses a meeting or has to reschedule, it's easy to go online and update the spreadsheet.

Today I decided to make a presentation in Google Docs so that I could easily share it with the 15-20 other teachers who are using our introductory Norwegian textbook Sett i gang.  We already have a password-protected place on our website where we have made extra materials, such as presentations, tests, and grammatical exercises available for teachers to download.  However, sometimes we make new materials during the course of the semester as needed.  Right now, we are working on common activities in daily routines with a grammatical focus on verb tenses and varied word order.  On Friday, we had used a Powerpoint with photos of a Norwegian student as she goes through a typical day.  For Monday, I want to review the vocabulary and continue to work on word order and verb tenses, so I made a presentation in Powerpoint using drawings that a student had made for a presentation about 5 years ago.

Since I had already made this presentation in Powerpoint, all I had to do was to upload and import the file to Google Docs, make a few last changes to the content, and save the file.  With just the click of a button, I was able to publish the document to the web and copy the code so I could paste it into this blog entry.  Couldn't be easier or more convenient.  I could also share the document with the other teachers so that they could view it or add to it