Boggled

Today I met with Dan Gaudiano, a grade seven science teacher at Punahou, who showed me how he's been using Google Docs as a collaborative workspace with his students. So I started playing around with it tonight, and I've got to say I'm blown away. Not only is there a terrific variety of editing tools that allow you to do things that are much more labor-intensive in Blogger—like being able to designate colors for your text—in a nice clean workspace, and not only can you work with others in real time to create a document or project—and track the changes as you do so—but as soon as you're done you can publish to your blog with one click, which is what I have done here: this post was composed in Google Docs and then just zapped over to my blog.

I'm starting to plan, right now, to set up a blog for each of my second semester classes and then have them use this space to work together on what shows up there. It beats the way I used to do things, trying laboriously to maintain a web site of my own, six ways to Sunday. This is pretty cool stuff. If any readers out there are way ahead of me on this, and have already implemented this with your classes, let me know by adding a comment below. I'd like to visit your site.