Dynamic collaboration with Google Apps

I absolutely love Google apps for many of the same reasons I love Macs - intuitive ways to interconnect different tools that interest you to customize your experience. Here are some of the Google apps I've been working with

• Google docs - includes text documents,  spreadsheets, and presentations (hmmm....sounds like Office....)
• Google sites - allows you to make pretty spiffy websites for free. 
• "my maps" in Google maps - allows you to make personalized pin placement maps, great for presentations and for highlighting geographical patterns
• Google Groups - basically the topic/comment discussion setup
• Google Calendars - can be displayed within docs/sites, or subscribed to externally
• Google photos - set up folders that many can access or add to
• Google news - personalize news to your interests - how about all the latest on "bacteria" for example?

There are others too like Google Scholar, but the ones above I'll highlight. Remember that one of the great things Google allows is for collaborative design. You can set up permissions so that certain people can also add/edit the document/folder/calendar, etc. so that it's a dynamic document/folder/calendar. 

Let me give an example from - interestingly enough - a website I set up for Evan's baseball team. (https://sites.google.com/site/vlfyanks/) using Google Sites. The site is set up so that the head coach and myself can edit any of the material at any time. We each also had authorship power on a Google calendar that was specifically set up for the team and is displayed there too. Anyone who subscribed to the calendar would automatically receive updates on their phone/computer/etc. when Ben or I updated it (which happens a lot in rec baseball....). A folder was set up in Google Photos (Picasa) that all of the parents had authorship on. This allowed any of us to dump in cool photos we had so that we could share them with others. I also constructed a map in Google Maps that showed were all of the rec fields were so people could find them if there was a rescheduling (see the bottom map on the page linked here). An RSS feed (link) was available that allowed folks to get info that way too. 

Way too cool. Most importantly, the collaborative nature of these tools really makes them powerful. There should be plenty of applications for teaching and departmental stuff. With the collaborative Biology Alumni Database (using Google documents spreadsheet) we've already started this.