Back in September we asked teachers to send us some examples of how they used Docs in their classrooms. Teachers are some of our most avid Docs users, so I knew we would see some pretty creative ideas.Once again, I was impressed by our teachers' creativity, ingenuity and ability to use Docs to solve every day challenges. The submissions we received ranged from forms that students use to provide peer feedback for group work or write a book review for their class to spreadsheets used to conduct science experiments. Some teachers, like Sallie Hill,...
Monday, 22 December 2008
Friday, 19 December 2008
If you often work with Google Docs, you probably want more ways to access your docs quickly. A recent example is the handy Docs gadget in Gmail that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs right from within Gmail. Today, we'd like to introduce a desktop-based, better looking cousin.The Google Desktop team is pleased to release a Google Docs Gadget for Google Desktop. It allows you to search and open your Google documents right from your...
Thursday, 18 December 2008
As some of you may have already noticed, the Google Docs Help Forum (in English) has undergone a makeover. Here's what we've added:Question & answer format to help you find answered threads quicklyProfiles that allow you to associate a picture with your usernameAbility to subscribe to threads by email or RSS feed so you can get updatesVotes for the best answer to a question, and the ability to tag an answer to your question as the 'Best answer.'Your feedback proved invaluable when designing the new platform. Thanks in advance for your patience...
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Last month, we announced a Google Docs gadget as a new feature in Gmail Labs. Today, I wanted to let you know about another Docs feature in Gmail Labs called "Create a Document". It gives you the ability to 1) turn an email (with all of its replies) into a Google document and 2) create a new blank document using a keyboard shortcut: 'g' and then 'w'.Read more about this new feature on the Gmail blog.Then try it out by going to the Gmail Labs tab...
Friday, 5 December 2008
Last week, Jason Morrison (a Google employee) and his wife Ann had their first child, the beautiful baby girl pictured above. The baby's name is Athena Marie Morrison. What's cool, fascinating, and crazy (all at the same time) about Athena's name is that Jason and Ann asked family, friends, co-workers and even random strangers across the Internet to help them name their baby.In early September, Jason posted a simple request on his personal blog "Hey...
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
In addition to our initial set of holiday templates, we've just added some new holiday-themed forms to help you organize your party guest lists, Secret Santa's and more.In the spirit of the season, we also thought it might be fun to show a more playful side of Google Docs, so here's a short video to celebrate the holidays -- enjoy!Happy Holidays from all of us on the Google Docs team!Posted by: Vivian Leung & Andrew Chang, Google Docs Market...
Friday, 21 November 2008
We've recently added a whole new section to the templates gallery for form templates. You'll find 13 new forms that cover a wide range of uses including personal health management, improving customer satisfaction and planning a party.Here are three shining examples:Training for a marathon? Check out the 'Running Log' template below. This will make getting into shape much easier.Curious to know what your visitors think of your website? The 'Website...
Thursday, 20 November 2008
Are you a Gmail addict? Ever wanted quicker access to your online documents without having to leave your precious inbox? Well, we've recently launched a Google Docs gadget to give you direct access to your documents straight from Gmail.By default the gadget shows a list of your most recently accessed documents, but you can change this to documents you own, you have opened or you have starred. And let's not forget search - you can find any document...
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
The holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, but preparing for the holidays can sometimes be time-consuming and stressful. Whether you're still planning your Thanksgiving party, or already working on your gift shopping list, you might want to check out our new templates for the holidays -- a series of templates designed to help make your holidays a little more efficient (and cost-effective, too). You'll find everything from party...
Monday, 3 November 2008
In early September, Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow visited Google in their modified double-decker school bus. Their bus is really two buses fused together with an organic garden on the roof. (The picture above shows our very own Jen Mazzon holding a cauliflower in front of the bus).Daniel and Casey are leading a petition-based initiative to request that the next president plant an organic farm on the grounds of the White House....
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
You're now able to embed a Google Docs presentation in your LinkedIn profile, allowing you to enhance your professional profile with text, images, and even videos.For those of you unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it's the world's largest online professional network. LinkedIn allows you to create a profile that showcases your skills and talents, and helps you find and connect with your trusted contacts and share ideas and opportunities.Who might benefit from an embedded presentation in their profile? Graphic designers and photographers can showcase examples...
Tom Barrett is back again for a third guest post. This time, he offers practical tips for using Google Docs in class and asks for help adding more tips. The collaborative presentation he and other teachers are creating will be a great complement to all of the ideas and projects we collected from K-12 teachers in September. We're in the process of sorting through the many great submissions and will share them with everyone in the near future. And so, without further ado, here's Tom.The mornings are becoming darker and the leaves are changing colour...
Monday, 27 October 2008
Recently, the Google Docs team started working with Viewpath, a company dedicated to providing project management solutions. In keeping with this commitment, they recently added a Gantt chart gadget to the spreadsheets platform. Here on the Docs team, we're thrilled to have this top-notch external developer contributing their expertise, and adding value to Google Docs. To introduce this gadget, we're happy to have Dean Carlson here as guest blogger. Dean is CEO ofViewpath, and helped in the development of Docs' Gantt chart gadget. ...
Recently, the Google Docs team started working with Viewpath, a company dedicated to providing project management solutions. In keeping with this commitment, they recently added a Gantt chart gadget to the spreadsheets platform. Here on the Docs team, we're thrilled to have this top-notch external developer contributing their expertise, and adding value to Google Docs. To introduce this gadget, we're happy to have Dean Carlson here as guest blogger. Dean is CEO of Viewpath, and helped in the development of Docs' Gantt chart gadget. ...
For more info on creating and integrating your own gadget using the Spreadsheets API, see "Getting Started with Spreadsheet Gadgets".
Posted by: Dean Carlson, Viewpath CEO
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and a footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.When you print or save as your document as a PDF, your footnotes will appear at the bottom of the page. You can see how your...
Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.[Insert image of a footnote in the margin]When you print or save as your document as a PDF, your footnotes will appear at the bottom of the page. You can see how your footnotes will appear when printed by selecting Print (Ctrl+P)...
Friday, 26 September 2008
Next week, we'll be introducing a new interface for our spreadsheet application, polishing up the navigation and making it look and feel like our word processing and presentation tools. At the top of the page, a new set of menus is the place to look for all of your favorite spreadsheet features. In the toolbar, we've concentrated the most commonly-used features as shortcuts to make formatting data easier and faster. And the Share menu (look for the...
Monday, 22 September 2008
Throughout my school days, one huge headache when writing a paper was that dreaded and extremely tedious bibliography. As a way for students, teachers, and professors to ease into the school year, we decided to create four bibliography templates representing various citation styles. We've created these templates so that students in various disciplines could reap the benefit of using one of these templates and copying these styles in their papers.You'll...
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
A few weeks ago, Tom Barrett wrote about how he introduces Year 5 students to Google Docs. This week he shares some common challenges teachers face when students begin working together on collaborative projects.Communication is important, not the toolThe success of our own class projects was not influenced by how well the children could use Google Docs. After all, it is not really about the tool -- it's about the group's ability to work together as a team. My class found this difficult throughout the year. I did not expect that just because we...
Monday, 15 September 2008
Last week we rolled out some back to school features, many of them inspired by your requests and stories of using Google Docs in K-12 classrooms. Now we're turning our sights to a new initiative. We want to collect your example projects and ideas for how to best use Google Docs (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and forms) in the classroom. We'll collect your ideas and share them with all educators on our Docs page on the Google for Educators site. To do this, we first need your inspiration and ideas.Are you using Google Docs...
Thursday, 11 September 2008
I'm writing this from the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, just 5 minutes before I hop on a plane back to Google in California. I spent the day at Arizona State University (ASU), the second stop on our Apps to School bus tour of U.S. college campuses. Boy, it was hot outside today: 94 F (34 C). I really enjoyed talking to students about Google tools like Docs and introducing them to new Docs features like our template gallery and forms.Before I board,...
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Fight on, Trojans! Yesterday, we spent the day at the University of Southern California, the first stop on the App to School bus tour of U.S. college campuses. We hung out with a lot of students (and some professors, too) who dropped by our demo stations, and showed them our favorite tips and tricks in Google Docs. Some of them also told us about how they used Docs in their classes, clubs, and even side businesses. In our down time, Jen and I managed...
We've been quiet for a while but are letting the news out. Presentations is nearing our first birthday, and we're unveiling a slew of new features that will make your presentations pop.To start off the announcement... reveals! You can set the order that objects appear. Or, setup a textbox to reveal paragraphs or bullets one at a time as you're giving a presentation. Reveals are perfect for pacing your talk, keeping the audience focused on you rather...
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
In August, I announced our sponsorship of Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing opportunity for U.S. high school students. I invited teachers to ask their students to write to the next U.S. president about the issues that matter to them the most.The deadline to register for this project is Friday, Sept. 12th.Teachers and mentors: all that you need to do is get an account on the National Writing Project website and provide your name, school name, contact information, and a brief description of the class...
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Tom Barrett is an assistant headteacher at a primary school in north Nottinghamshire, England. We first noticed Tom's blog in May when he gave a week by week account of introducing Google Docs and Google Apps to his Year 5 students. Tom's starting a new term this September and we've invited him to share some best practices for introducing new people (in his case, his 10-year-olds) to Google Docs.Modeling expected behavior and good practices firstAs our first Google Docs project began to gather pace last school year, I realised that the children...
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
I know it's not over yet - but summer has flown by too quickly again. We know it's coming to an end when we start saying 'goodbye' to the incredibly talented interns who joined our team for the summer. With the goodbyes are always a load of thank yous for what they've added to Google Docs. Here are some anecdotes:Shrikant Shanbhag says, "The fact that I got to work on what I asked for and to see all the changes I made actually make it to production is immensely gratifying. Some of the keyboard shortcuts I implemented are incidentally the only features...
Thursday, 14 August 2008
We made a few improvements to the spreadsheets editor this week, which you can read about in our user group. Among the changes were some improvements to Forms.The most visible change makes the whole Forms feature more accessible to you, since "spreadsheets" isn't the first place you'd look to create a form. We noticed that many of you search for "Forms" from your Docs List and from within the other editors (documents, presentations). So, we've made...
Thursday, 7 August 2008
The U.S. presidential campaign is drawing unprecedented interest among young people. What issues matter most to America's youth? Are they concerned about the economy and gas prices? Or is climate change, Iraq, or global terrorism foremost on their minds? We'd like to find out by giving them the ability to express themselves through their words during the period of the presidential election.We've teamed up with the National Writing Project to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing project that...
Monday, 4 August 2008
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Several months ago, Joelle asked teachers to tell us how they've been using Docs in the classroom. We received stories from professors and instructors all over the world. In today's post, I'd like to highlight three specific educators from México, Germany and Portugal:Jose I. Icaza is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey N.L., México. He teaches courses in Leadership for Sustainable Development."I use Docs documents to have my graduate...
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
A quick note to point you, yet again, to an exceptional use case described in the Teaching With Technology blog. In a recent post, Mr. Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of setting up parent:teacher meetings easily using Docs. Take inspiration from this idea, and as always, feel free to leave a comment and let us know how you use Docs to make things a bit easier :)Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Mana...
Monday, 21 July 2008
Don Campbell is President of Expand2Web, and dedicates his career to helping small business owners with local store-fronts connect with customers over the web. Here, he proves his tech-savvy creativity by showing us a very fun, and seasonally-appropriate use of forms. I spend most of my time every day working with small business owners helping them with their local search strategy to get more customers from the web. But sometimes the best...
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today.When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and...
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