Thing #18: Online Productivity Tools

Either of these tools (OpenOffice.org or Google Docs), if they work like they claim to, will be useful for our students who want to do work at home or at school. Many times a student comes in the library with a document he has saved on a flash drive at home and wants to open it on our library computers. Even though the student usually thinks he has used the same software we have, most of the time it is different or at least a different version that our computers may not read. Needless to say, the student is quite upset when he realizes he is not going to be able to access his work (usually we can work around this problem in some other way, but by using either Google Docs or OpenOffice, we should be able to greatly reduce the number of times this happens). These tools give us another way to work with students and provide opportunities for them (and us!) to become more Web 2.0 savvy. And of course the best part of all... they are FREE! For severely underfunded schools, this could be a huge advantage.

I really had not explored Google Docs enough to know what all was there. Besides the documents, presentations and spreadsheets, I'm impressed with the hundreds of templates that are available. I will definitely be using the flash cards, as well as the gas mileage chart when we go on vacation.