Google and Diigo reflection

I had used googledocs on a limited basis prior to this course and really liked the experience.  The first time I used a googledoc was for a group presentation for this masters program and it helped the three of us connect without having to be face to face and we could share our materials more easily than we could have in an email.  There is no way that we could have communicated better than we did through the googledoc.    

From that experience, I decided to use googledocs with my sociology students this trimester when they were working on their research paper.  Not only were they able to collaborate better, but they did not have the same amount of difficulty accessing their papers at home.  My district updated their version of Microsoft office a year ago, so student inevitably run into issues with opening and saving documents and then there are the few who do not have the office suit at home.   I was also able to access their papers throughout the whole process, so I could help them with citing issues and was able to guide them so they had the proper amount of depth in their analysis. 

This last weekend I did learn some more things about googledocs that I’m really happy with and plan to use with my students.  I had not taken the time to explore all the options offered to me with googledocs, but class gave me that time and I found some other templates that would work very nicely in economics.  Googledocs offers a number of templates for budgets and it even has a budget sheet that sorts out spending and income by percentages and then graphs it.  For students it’s difficult to understand the breakdown of spending vs. income, so to be able to see it without having to go through all the hassle of figuring out everything by hand will be nice. 

I already have wiki sites for each of my classes, so for me google sites felt a little redundant.  There are definitely things I liked better about google sites, but at the end of the day I’m not going to redo the sites I’ve already made.  The look and feel of the google sites is more professional than a wiki site, but that was really the only thing that stuck out to me as being the biggest difference. 

My first experience with social book marking was an in-service presentation at the beginning of this school year.  The presenter used delicious to share the technology links he wanted to share with us.  I can see a site like diigo being very useful for me.  In my department we share a lot of links with each other and if we are connected on diigo or even have a department diigo we could share links more efficiently.  Diigo would also help me organize all of my links better.  Currently I have the most important links on my favorites bar, but because of how our network is set-up every time I restart my computer I have to go to my toolbars and reselect my favorites bar.  It’s cumbersome and gets annoying, so if I have all my links on diigo then I just have to go to my account and my links are all there.