Weekly reflection: Google Docs

Well, I have to say that I really love Google Docs for a number of reasons. First among them is that I can take notes in class with whatever computer is available and I can access those notes from any other computer. I also like the new Forms function (can we say, "yay!"?). Let's not forget about how we can collaborate, too. I like it that it's a lot like a wiki in that you can collaborate with your team.

But it ends there. Because the bottom line is that it is limited in your functionality. When you're done collaborating, someone needs to download it and pretty-fy it. Take, for example, my last project with Hai and Tracy. While Google Docs was great for us to come up with the content of our presentation, we couldn't use Google Docs to make a GREAT presenation. No. And the nature of asynchronous online collaboration -- iterative, scrolling through each person's schedule to accumulate our collaborative efforts -- we couldn't get to the point where Tracy could fold our stuff into her awesome PPT template and neat animations, music, and slide transitions. Google Docs just couldn't handle that and all that stuff would get lost if she tried to upload the results of her hard work.

What Tracy did, instead, was de-uglify the original Google Docs template, but there's only so much de-uglifying you can do. Yes. I just made up that word. Welcome "de-uglify" to the English language.

Anyway, we uploaded the presentation to SlideShare, but it also removes all animations, music, and slide transitions. Oh well.

Anyway, here's a link to the .mov file, and the following is the embedded SlideShare file:

Where's ITEC

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