Looking back at the
old days when Internet is less developed, people used to meet up and using pens
and papers to record all the information and notes. It is such a waste for time
and natural resources. When doing group work, meeting up is inconvenient as every
member lives in different places. It is very troublesome and difficult for
everyone to meet up and discuss together in a place. Nowadays, Internet and IT
gadgets have solved these problems and allow users to do their discussion and
record notes easily and efficiently. However, some of the Internet users
misusing it by doing unproductive thing such as playing games and watching
movies or dramas. Internet is very helpful if we use it wisely.
Our lecturer of
Social Networking for Higher Education subject, Mr. Lye, assigned us a group
assignment using the aid of digital electronics – Note Taking. In order to
complete our task, we have created a Google Docs among our group members. It
was the first time for me to expose to Google Docs app. At first I’m having
trouble using the apps but after exploration, I found that it was an
interesting one and it can make life so much easier and efficient! And I did
some exploration on other Google apps too.
Google Docs allow us to share our file among our group members and real-time editing together with a lot of users. The host is allowed to control that who gets to view, edit or comment in the document. Any of the group members can get into the document using smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktops as long as they are connected to Internet. Thus, these make group work becomes easier as it can be done online and group members need not to meet up. Adding on, we can use the built-in live chat that provided by Google Docs to chat and discuss about our group assignment. There is a history list of edition to allow us to get back to the old edits and we can easily know who did the editing at the stated time.
Google Docs shown
that when someone makes an editing to the document, the changes will appear on
others’ screen, with the name next to the cursor. This feature helps us to
identify who were typing and working together at the same time. Besides, every
one of us is allowed to highlight and comment other group members’ works or
assign the work by highlighting and comment. The feature that I like the most
in Google Docs is the auto-save! Our document is saved in Google Drive
automatically so that we do not need to worry if we accidentally closed the
document without saving.
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| Highlighting and commenting by using Google Docs |
I’m going to briefly explain how my group
completes the Note-taking assignment now. Before starting to
do our group project, all of us did a lot of researches and analysis all the
important information. We assign our works by creating a sub-title and each of
us taking one sub-title to do it. I’ve highlighted and put a comment to let my
group members know which sub-title they are doing. I took quite some time to
complete my assigned sub-title. We also read through our group members’ works
and leave a comment or even edit the text if we found that there is something
wrong. During the whole process, we use Facebook chat to communicate instead of
the Google Docs built-in live chat because we found that Facebook chat is
easier to contact and communicate with all the members. The next step that we
are planning to do is transferring our notes into Google Slide and designs it nicely.
Hope that our group does well in the coming presentation.
Overall, Google
Docs has made group work easier and efficient. I’m glad that I have the
opportunity to explore to this app and it brings my life easier. Now, I am
looking forward what Internet can bring to us in the future and benefit
us.
Thanks for reading!
Hope you enjoy it! :)
