The Digital Diet, Day 1

Today I reviewed a chapter from the book The Digital Diet: Today's digital tools in small bytes by Andrew Churches, Lee Crockett, and Ian Jukes. The book highlights several of the ways web 2.0 tools are being incorporated into the classroom. The book is heavy on the educational use rather than the typical or everyday use. The chapter I reviewed focus on the topic of collaborative editing. This is basically editing of  different files over the web with individuals in different locations. The book used the Adobe application to edit information online, but I would prefer to use the Google platform. The basic concept with collaborative editing is that groups or pairs can work on a document at the same time when they are not together.

As far as classroom implications the book suggest that collaborative editing would be great for teachers that incorporate a heavy emphasis on group work. In addition to group work, the teachers can take advantage of the comments sections to leave feedback in either a formative or summative assessment check. The ideas seems simple and as long as the teachers and students know how to use the programs that enable group sharing and editing via the web, I do not see why schools could not use this teaching tool.

I have personally used Google in several of my graduate classes. I have started to use it more and more as i like the ability work on a document or a spreadsheet with my classmates without having to save a file, upload it, attach it to an email, and then follow up to make sure they got it. The ability to log into my Google account and click share to the provided email address is ingenious. It allows for twice the work to get done and allows for us to see realtime updates as we both edit the same document. I am pro collaborative editing.