Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons for our move to Google for Education was the Documents and Spreadsheets application. Have you ever been at home and wished you had that file you were working on at school? Have you ever wanted to share your work, or work on a project with a colleague? You could send the file to yourself and your colleague as an email attachment but a far more useful approach can now be found in your new Google for Education account.
From your email main page click “Documents” (top left of your page). This takes you to the Documents and Spread sheets page. Think of it as your own little server that follows you where ever you go. Besides offering a fully functional basic word processor and an excel like spread sheet program, Docs and Spreadsheets allows you to upload files from your teacher folder or desktop to your online space. Click the “Upload” link to start the wizard.
Choose "Browse" to navigate to your file, then click "Upload File". In a moment you will receive confirmation that your file has been uploaded. As a Google Doc you may now access that file from any internet connected computer in the world.
But wait, it gets better! Want to share that file with a colleague? From within one of your documents or spreadsheets press the "Share" tab (top right) and you can choose to share your file, for simple viewing or for full collaboration. Enter the email addresses of those you wish to share with and they will be notified in an email message.
Collaborators have the ability to make changes to your document, great for those team projects or for class room activities. Better still, Docs and spreadsheets tracks all the revisions made by each of your collaborators and offers a color coded view of those changes as well as information as to when those changes took place. Don't like what your Collaborator changed? Simply revert back to any of the revisions. Don't want changes to be made? Choose "as viewers only" in the invitation box. The choice is yours!
Now might be a good time to upload some of your school documents to your online space. That way you will have access to them all summer long! If you have any questions feel free to contact me at jcasavant@rssu.org
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