Friday, November 9, 2007

Thing 9

As instructed, I tried out several Google products - some for the first time, others that I've used before. My favorite is Google Earth, which I've been using for several months in conjunction with looking at realty property listings. I find it absolutely amazing, although the images are a few years old. I have also used Google Books quite a bit, appreciating the easy access to full text versions of literary classics, the ability to searching within the text for a particular passage, and the direct link to WorldCat. Although the directive was to check out the "Communicate, show & share" category, those tools seemed pretty much in line with what we've been doing in the 10 things - gmail, blogging, etc. I then proceeded to use GoogleDocs which I found very intuitive and straightforward, much more so than Word. The most obvious advantage over Word is the ability to share documents, allowing for collaboration (as demonstated in the Common Craft video clip) and to publish directly to the Internet. I was previously unaware of the features of GoogleDocs and am most impressed with its potential.

1 comment:

rich said...

that sounds like a good use of google earth. i'll try it myself.