Week 7 Report/Reflection

After a well deserved (and short) reading week, I'm back at you with Week 7.

On the docket for discussion this week is a personal favourite tool of mine.  It is the hero group projects deserves: Google Docs, or now more commonly known as Google Drive.

Source: http://www.itcentralpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/GoogleDrive.jpg

 

Google Drive comes with your Google Account.  It is essentially your personal cloud based storage.  Initially starting off as Google Docs, it was limited only to storing word documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows.    Google has vastly expanded and improved upon the service where you can now store virtually anything, given you do not go over your 15 GB storage limit.  Even then, you can pay for more.  

 

Now, Google Drive is commonly used to store not only documents, but also pictures, home videos, games, applications, etc.  All photos and videos that you take with an Android phone are automatically backed up in the event of it going haywire and losing all your data and memories.  If you have amassed quite a archive, it has a search feature so you can dig up that embarrassing photo of your friend from the Christmas party or your brainstorming session from months ago.  Just make sure you name it well.   

 

You are not only able to store documents, but with Drive's built in tools, you are also able to edit and share them publicly.  The killer feature of Google Drive, in my opinion, is the fact that others not only view but also edit your work simultaneously, given you have enabled them to do so.  Having used Google Drive already for several group projects, it makes assembly and proofreading of the final draft much easier.  The user interface is very similar to Microsoft Office making it very easy to use with a very little learning curve, if any.  To top it all off, you are able to download the created documents and open them in their respective Microsoft Office applications.  

 

When we were given our collaborative assignment on a digital literacy topic, I intuitively thought of using Google Drive to complete it.  My intuition didn't matter as we were required to use it anyways.  

 

The document portion of Google Drive is useful beyond just for group projects.  They can also be used for writing songs.  Songwriting can be a long process and you will find you must often come back to it and work on it before you are happy with it.  It can also be used to store sensitive information like passwords or locker combinations.  It can also be used for business proposals and presentations.  No more carrying around a USB stick.  It's on the cloud.  A to-do list for group planning would also be a great use for it as others can put whether they have completed it or not right on the doc. 

 

Google Drive is a great tool that is already on my PLE and for good reason.  If my praise of it hasn't made you see its potential, or university group projects haven't made you rip your hair out, I'm not too sure what will.       

Working collaboratively with my partner, Guy Jung, has been a good experience.  This is the second project I've ever done purely online with no personal interaction, and the inclusion of Google Drive has made it much more pleasant.  In my previous group assignment, the stubbornness of my group mates to use and learn new software was rather irritating and between using Facebook and Microsoft Office to get the job done was, quite frankly, a pain in the behind when we could've just used Google Drive to get the job done and not send and resend our work countless times.  I commend this course for exposing us to some great tools like this and can only hope more people will adopt it into their repertoire of school tools.     

Source: http://www.cesim.com/Portals/104692/images/Collaboration.jpg

 

For this week's installment of  Feedly Weekly is an article from NPR.  In it is an interview with Julia Angwin, a writer for ProPublica.  Running 30+ minutes, she discusses the illusion of privacy and anonymity on the internet and how your internet browsing/searching habits are easily re-traceable.  The link to the interview is here.