Giddy for Google Docs

I have been using Google Docs for a bit now and am pretty hooked. My team at work uses it to craft our meeting agenda and take notes (which we then transfer over to our Google Groups site), I use it to track student grades with my fellow instructor for the graduate course we teach, and I have shared several documents with folks to get feedback. It's not "new" for me anymore.

So imagine how I had to suppress my grin yesterday while at a planning meeting for our district CDEP team and one of the administrators mentioned that two members "found" Google Docs and wondered if we might be able to use them for the completion of the plan!!

Within half an hour - we all met so that I could give a crash course on actually using it and develop a plan to get everyone registered and set for our meeting next week. We had a minor set-back when our IT guy wanted to just go out and register everyone himself and I pushed back. I was honest in telling them that my secret hope was that if the teachers registered themselves they would learn more (teach a man to fish......)but most importantly - they would know how to teach their students to register when they wanted to use it in their classroom.

Apparently - I lept a little too far forward in time for that particular moment. But I am convinced that once the teachers see the power of the tool with our committee, they will find applications to their own classroom. So much so that I've decided to stop playing chicken and integrate it into the writing work I will do with the teachers later in the month.

Breathes some new life into my planning!! And a good lesson for me - the Web 2.0 world doesn't need to be a mystical place. We just need to enter it slowly...

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