Google Docs

How did I exist before Google Documents? I can't remember. I don't want to remember. I think before, we past around Word documents in our email accounts and used track changes to keep track of the offerings of others. That method feels a bit like carving in stone now.

If you have NEVER heard of Google Documents, stop right now and take their tour. Click here.

How do I use Google documents? Here is a list of the top 3 ways that I am using it now.

1. I am planning a conference for the North Carolina Community College Association of Distance Learning. I am sharing the responsibilities of receiving the requests to speak and mapping out who is speaking where. The person who is working with me lives 2 hours a way. So, we have several documents where we store a master list and play around with the schedule daily (actually hourly.)

2. My department has to write several documents as a team. We are all going 90-miles a hour in different directions. We can't sit around a Word document. We have to come to it when we can. We write EVERYTHING in Google documents. I know that in an instant, I can find the most up-to-date version of what we are doing.

3. All online and webbed faculty at GTCC have to complete our certification course in order to teach either online or webbed for our school. We have 400-plus faculty members in some state of this certification. Our faculty receive professional development credit for completing this course and many departments require a certain number of hours in order to live up to their contract. Instead of contacting Organizational Development every time someone finishes a part of our training, we instead give them access of our Google Document speadsheet that documents to the day when someone completed something.

Google documents takes organization to a new level. And as someone who is anal about organization, Google documents is been a bright spot in my already too-busy day.