I return once again to posting about some accessible and, by the time I figure it out, pretty widely used tools that I recommend to history and social studies education students. This time I recommend the tool to anyone who needs to collaborate on a project. This includes colleagues who are planning conferences or productions of any kind. The tool is Google Docs. Its also great if you are creating documents in one place that you will want to easily access in another place without carrying around flash drives or burning CDs.
Rather than explaining how it works, I suggest you watch this YouTube video, “Google Docs in Plain English“
I co-chair the Oral History Association Program Committee this year and we used Google Docs to finalize the schedule of the upcoming annual meeting (Oct 15-19, 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA). On another committee, we are using Google Docs to discuss design features for a new organizational Web site. I’ve found that some folks have a few hurdles getting set up to use Google Docs but be patient, follow the directions, you will get it working. Some folks still email around things instead of putting these in Google Docs. Problems arise when individuals change things that don’t get shared across the whole group; changes get lost when different people are working on different versions of the same document.
I had already set up a Gmail account and that makes things easier. If you are hesitant to have yet another email address, it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t access the Gmail for months and it did not fill up with spam or misdirected email messages.
[...] #4 Google Docs [...]