The latest of Westminster's 23 Things is online applications, specifically Google apps. As I've been using Google docs for some time, I don't feel I need to do the task set. Instead, I will take this opportunity for some general Google musings.
Once upon a time, Google was merely a search engine. Nowadays, it is much more than this. I have an igoogle homepage on my laptop, I switched from yahoo mail to gmail in 2009, my rss feeds are managed in Google Reader, when I need a picture of something I use Google images, and when I need to translate something I use Google Translate. My android phone uses Google and came with a load of pre-installed apps, including maps, talk and voice search. Then there's Google Scholar and Google Books. Even this blog is a Google product.
At Westminster, our students get Google accounts for their main university email. Staff get both outlook and gmail. We regularly use Google docs to collaborate on tasks. I have found this to be a helpful tool, although it's not always flawless. Last year, we decided to have individual pages for the Academic Liaison Librarian team and Google sites provided the best platform for us to create these pages, as we could have ownership of them and edit as required, rather than relying on someone else.
To finish, here's a timely video from yet another Google-owned product, You Tube.
Thank you for the insight, I would think using google docs would be really useful for sharing documents. I've been told we are not allowed to use it sadly :(
ReplyDelete