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.

Reasonable cost personalized posters for office/lab

Seeing the quality of the posters that we got for research conferences from Media Services I decided to try making a personal poster for my office. Grabbed a bunch of my favorite photos taken at pretty good resolution, placed them into my Powerpoint template for a 24"Hx36"L poster, added a black border and had them print it up on Super Gloss.

So for just under $20 I got a personalized poster for my office that looks pretty good too. Turnaround time was 2 days from when I submitted it. 

First glance at Google plus

a former student (Will Elias) was kind enough to invite me to Google Plus - the only way you can join it at the moment (Google's way of generating buzz). Google+ is Google's answer to Facebook.

It's in the early phases of development but there are a couple of neat things I see so far:
- the ability to interconnect the Google Apps with the social media. I'm a big fan of Google Apps so I'm curious to see how this develops

- the ability to more effectively partition out what news/information goes to what group of people in your "friends" list. Of course, one of the first things that stands out is that Google does away with "friends" and replaces it with your "circles" which is a big plus over Facebook. So now, every posting you have gets connected to a particular circle of people that you've defined as friends, acquantances, people you follow, etc. (it's more than just a wording thing).  So now students can post comments from the outing with their friends the night before and not worry about their profs seeing it! Seriously though, what intrigues me about this feature is that now you might just build up a ton  of contacts of people that you know in any capacity, but you can easily partition out how you interact with them in this media. For example, I was thinking that now I would consider asking students to connect with me through this since I could add them to a, say, "bio321 circle" which would not get personal information posted there.

- G+ also has a way to interconnect with people via video/IM in a controlled manner through what they call their "hangout rooms". Technically I could start a hangout room that was only available to Bio321 students so they could drop in if they wanted. This might be useful for virtual office hours or even for teaching in the event of sickness. One thing I didn't see is a way to show a Google Presentation in there (Google's equiv. of powerpoint) which would make it even cooler for teaching potential, but I did email that suggestion into Google.

Should be interesting to see this develop. There's enough backing with Google Apps here at Elon that it wouldn't be a hard transition for most of the students, although I'm not sure that will be the case nationwide since Facebook is pretty entrenched. Still, it's hard to not like the interconnectivity of G+ with Google Apps - sort of like the allure of the Mac system applications

If anyone in the department is interested in playing around with it let me know - once you get invited it lets you invite 50 other people, so I can pass that on to you.

twitter feeds

Had Moodle training yesterday. More on Moodle later but Randy Piland (Faculty Technology Fellow) showed us the ins and outs of twitter feeds which really got me excited.

There are a lot of different kinds of Twitterers out there - ranging from a simple enthusiast to world experts on any topic that you might be interested in. What I'm going to do this year is set up a Twitter feed on the class website that will funnel in current musings/postings from Twitter feeds from professional Microbiology groups. An example of this is embedded on the right side of the screen albeit I still need to work on the formatting.

My goals for this is to bring current information directly to the students as an enhancement to the course, however I can see where you could build in assignments around this too. I do bring current information into the course anyways but I like how this really highlights the cool and emerging topics

lynda.com

I keep forgetting about this great resource - www.lynda.com. Great tutorial videos on all sorts of tech-related tasks or for how to accomplish specific things within common core software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.). This is a FREE resource for all Elon faculty, staff,  and students

www.lynda.com

there are probably things we can refer the students to in here that would allow them to work through basic tasks like "how to make a graph in excel"

Google docs for a digital research lab notebook

OK, first official content for my blog....

One of the things I've been experimenting with this past year that I really like is the use of Google Docs as a digital labbook for my research students. This stems from my personal transition to a digital notebook during my postdoc in order to solve 2 problems. First, searching through many hardcopy notebooks for notes on one specific problem is a drag. Second, when you relocate or have a meeting with another lab person, it's a pain to drag these labbooks all over the place and you never seem to have the one that you need. Lastly, there are useful websites, papers, etc. that it is often handy to refer to while you're looking through your data/methods.

Google docs solve these problems to a certain extent.
- you can perform word searches to locate individual projects. This is easier if you include some descriptive narrative in your notebook
- the Google docs sit "in the cloud" meaning they are on an external server and accessible from any computer. I can pull up the date from the lab, the office, or even at home very easily with a simple login to Google
- you can embed links to useful web resources/papers, etc really easily.

Something that Google Docs doesn't do well right now is to have within document tagging/linking - or perhaps I just haven't discovered it? I'll keep looking. This would be useful to help cross-reference studies - not every study is relevant to just one thing you are doing.

I started having research students use this format last year and have been really pleased with it. As I run back and forth between office/lab/home I can always pull up their notes and check to see how things are progressing or help them with interpretations. The students have been really positive about it as well. Most of them are already pretty adept with Google Docs and like the technology.

Last issue - permissions and backup issues with storing data on the cloud. You can set up the Google docs so that only you and the student can access it - your data is not visible across the web. Also, you can download your document at any time to have a working backup on your hard drive.

Other features of note:
- embedding images like gels, data analysis figures, etc. is pretty easy and keeps you from having to print them out.
- you can easily make comments in their notebook that they can refer to later. I have students write out their initial interpretations then I add my own in after to help them learn and to give them a future reference.
- ability to cut and paste previous protocols to increase efficiency
- much much easier to read than handwritten
- you can always see when the document has been edited (timestamp)
-  you can actually instant message each other to the side of the document - this has been useful a few times when each in different locations

Sample from digital lab notebook

This won't be the last time I talk about Google apps, they seem to be useful for a wide range of things in this setting!

1st follower!

Robert - thanks for volunteering to "follow" this blog while I work out the bugs. Feel free to try out things like commenting on posts, etc. as well as commenting on what is useful and what isn't. Once these things are worked out I'll start some actual meaningful blogging!