[DG: Teaching & Learning] Using Google Docs

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Neil Sheflin <sheflin at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> I am using google docs to have students in a 30 member honors
> macroeconomics course do weekly, 'team' executive summaries of course
> related current news. Each student in a team of 3 is supposed to write a
> punchy, bulleted exec summary of an item related to the team's focus
> (economists' blogs, monetary policy, etc.) and supposed to correct,
> extend, comment on another team member's post. Since all students work
> on the same document, they advertently or inadvertently are seeing
> everyone else's postings, and I can quickly go down the 'page' and see
> what everyone is doing. Due to very early beta implementation of docs in
> sakai, I am doing it out of sakai so far, although using sakai for the
> rest of the course. I previously tried this in wiki, too awkward, and
> using blog, way too awkward.

I wonder how the new commenting features in Google Docs might
facilitate enhanced collaborative approaches like this.

<http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/03/introducing-discussions-in-google-docs.html>

I haven't used this sort of thing yet in classes, but I'm interested
in exploring the possibilities. The key technical thing that I'd need
to do this is for Sakai permissions to be integrated with Google Docs
permissions, so that I could assign a Sakai group, say responsibility
for a document, and they in turn could open up their doc(s) for wider
viewing and comments, without having to go manually configure this
themselves (by adding lists of email addresses, say).

Does the GD integration rSmart wrote cover this?

Bruce