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7 things you should know about...
Google Apps
Scenario
To support her master’s thesis in sociology, Sylvia de-
veloped a project that brought together students from
a high school in downtown Chicago with students from
Monroe High School in Monroe, Wisconsin. Despite be-
ing just a two-hour drive away, the schools were worlds
apart culturally, and the project’s goal was to investigate
attitudes that students in each school held about those
at the other. The instrument for the project was a fiction-
writing exercise in which a group of students at each
school would write a story set in the other school’s town.
As the stories developed, the students at each school
would review and make edits to the story from the other
school. Both schools suffered from outdated computers
with a range of software (though all of it was PC-based)
and no prospect of district funding for hardware or soft-
ware improvements. Sylvia was a dyed-in-the-wool Mac
user, which presented another compatibility concern.
They all had Internet connections, however, at least at
school, and most of the students selected to participate
also had Gmail accounts.
Sylvia set up blank documents on Google Docs and
granted access to the participating students. She left
the story ideas and development entirely up to the
students. Once a week, the two groups would “trade”
papers, seeing how the story—ostensibly about them—
was progressing and making comments in the file itself
about how their town and its culture differed from the
story’s portrayal. Sylvia also reviewed the files and made
her own suggestions. Because all of the writing and re-
viewing happened through web browsers, there were
no problems with file compatibility, and Google Docs
kept a record of the many versions of each story. Initially,
Sylvia thought she and the students would keep in touch
using Gmail, but the students soon began using Google
Talk among themselves, so Sylvia did too. Those stu-
dents who had Internet access at home coul