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Saving the World through Educational TechnologyArchive for Didactic
The Google Apps – Portal Connection
Though most lenses looking at Google Docs focus on its potential to empower students in their own learning and collaboration, there are certainly some wonderful benefits for more didactic methods as well. Students always want access to an original Powerpoint lecture for later use, and your portal is a great way to get it to them. As an involuntary user of Blackboard, I find that the marriage of your portal with Google Docs is a match made in heaven.
The problems with the traditional arrangement include too many clicks, document updates, and compatibility issues. In any e-learning portal, getting a Powerpoint document online, requires too darn many clicks, waits, and pitfalls. It then sits there, while your golden copy you have locally gets updated. You then need to go through the steps again to update that presentation. Even then your students might experience the compatibility issue; I hope it wasn’t a pptx that you uploaded.
With Google Docs as your document management system, you can create (or upload existing) Powerpoint presentations and link or even embed them in your portal page. Then, when a quick update is needed, maybe even on the fly during class, you update it in Google Docs and the document automatically updates in your portal. For click minimalists, you can even email your documents directly to Google Docs from within Office and then do the linking.
Embedding is super cool, so let’s have a look at it. Open this link to a Google Presentation walking you through the steps to upload an existing Powerpoint and embed it in a Blackboard page (I would have embedded it but WordPress doesn’t allow it. You get what you pay for). Embedding is great because it gives a quick preview of the file and allows you to scroll through it without opening a new page or application. This is how technology should work for you.
An example of an embedded Google presentation in a Blackboard learning unit.
At the time of this writing, embedding is only available for presentations and forms, but all can be shared as links just as easily. You can embed spreadsheets with Edit Grid and documents with Scribd. Edit grid is arguably better than Google’s, while Scribd does not allow you to create documents online, only to upload and publish finished ones.
