I was just lurking around the Edina High School science department website, since they're our inspirations now (see http://www.district112.org/board_goals.html ) Anyway, I found a chemistry teacher who posts study guides for his classes in .rtf format (http://home.comcast.net/~stesanger/Chem_StudyGuides.htm ) The idea, I believe, is that is't more accessible for people without Word than .doc or .docx. Or maybe he's using a mac or OpenOffice and that's just how they came out. I don't know.
My revelation came when, becuase I was logged into google already, these documents opened in Google Docs. My idea was to create something and post it on Google Docs. I believe that I could then make it public and send out a link to it so others could view it (but not edit it). I'm not totally sure if this would work, but I have a hunch it would.
(Full disclosure: when I clicked on the link and it opened in Google, I actually thought that he had posted it in GoogleDocs. It wasn't until mid-blog that I realized that GoogleDocs taking control of it was an accident.)
I've always converted stuff to .pdf (just in case people they didn't have Word at home) and posted them online. But with rSchoolToday's inability to do just about everything that I want it to do, I knew I'd be looking for a better way.
I'm pretty sure that pbwiki is the solution to most of my problems, but I liked this idea too. By making a GoogleDoc (or making it in Word and importing it), it's stored online where kids can get to it without any special software. I don't know if they'd need a google account to open it or not, but I thought I'd pass along the idea in case it sparks anything for anybody else.
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Sounds like a great idea! I think that the students would have to have a Google account to be able to access a Google doc.
I had my students use Google docs to create a group lab report last week and it took us about 20 minutes to get everyone a Google account and to get a document started and shared with all of their group members. There was only about 4 students in each class who had a Google account. If we start using it in multiple classes that number should change.
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