Using Google Docs in Your Home School

Google is trying hard to be everything for everyone online.  And they're coming really close! Some of their beta projects are very intriguing...but I digress.

If you have a gmail account you have access to a plethora of other google applications including blogging, website design, a calendar, and documents, and many other things!

Once you've signed into your google (or Gmail) account you can find google docs here: Link
docs.google.com/

Setting up a Google document:

To set up a document click the word "Create" found on the left hand side of your screen.

This will prompt you to choose the type of document you would like to open.

Choices include: document (text,) spreadsheet, presentation, form, and others.

Make your selection.  For this demonstration I'll choose "document."

You have now created your new document:

From here you can click on the words "Untitled Document" and give it a name.  And then create your content in the same manner that  you would with any word processing tool. 

There are 2 beautiful things about using Google for documents.  

• The documents are stored in Google's harddrive. (Don't worry you can save them to your harddrive as well.  Oh, and you might choose discretion when it comes to sensitive documents since they are possibly less secure than on a home drive.)
• You can share the documents with other users.  This means that I can create documents and share them with my kids without printing them off!  I just have to click "share" in the top right corner, type in their email address, and voila!  I can even choose the level of sharing they have: read-only, or able to edit.

How cool is that?