Personally, I am not a follower of group activities; especially, those which are asked to be done after our class time since it is always a difficult duty to schedule meeting with other people outside the lecture room due to the different timetables. Particularly in a university context where most of the participants study and probably do something else apart from it.
With that application, it is possible to create different documents that the rest of our classmates can edit simultaneously or afterwards. So it is not necessary that we waste our free time getting together. For all those reasons, this program is getting more and more popular among students.
In this sense, I would dare to say since this Google product was launched in 2006; almost nobody is doing group activities in the more traditional way: students do not gather to work face-to-face. On the contrary, they all enter the web page at different times preventing the exchange of ideas and a deep discussion of them. In short, the work is carried out as it were an individual one.
To sum up, it is important to mention that Google Docs' usefulness is out of debate; the problem is that we overuse it, and we have forgotten that our professors included group job in their teaching programs due to the benefits behind it; in fact, it is expected that through this way of working, learns could be able to develop not only cognitive but also social/interpersonal skills.
Taking all the factors exposed above into account, could it be appropriate we labelled that as group work?
As we cannot deny the usefulness of this application; now I am going to show you a video where you are going to find the guidelines to use Google Docs.
In the video, it is possible for us to see how Google Docs works, and all the opportunities this tool offers its users., in terms of types of documents you can create and all the pre- designed patterns available.
Paula, I cannot agree with you in this point. According to my personal experience, Google Docs is really useful when it comes to work in groups, especially when the participants of the groups are from different cities. Regarding the development of social skills, I think that it depends on the organization that every group has. For instance, there might be some people who just save and share their work on Google Docs. But, there may be others who set a time to work as an actual group and share their opinions though the chat window that can be opened in the same document.
ReplyDeleteOf course, it depends on each group and their organization, but we cannot deny that there is a huge difference between face-to-face communication and chat communication, especially when the idea is to develop students social skills.
Delete