Google Docs Totally Rocs!

So this past weekend was filled with me trying to catch up in this class from suffering a horrible illness.  What was worst was that I became ill in  the middle of my FIRST ever online collaboration project!  I was partnered up with my awesome math-education girl, Whitney and I couldn't help but show up to class Thursday morning -- like I said, it was my first online group project, so I didn't feel comfortable not talking to Whitney about our lesson plan.  We finalized our plans, and I bolted out of class after 30 minutes of trying to sit still.... And then I begin to work on the lesson plan...

It was the funniest thing. I went onto GoogleDocs and Whitney just so happened to get online at the same time.... and we pretty much chatted for at least 30 minutes on our activity sheet: it was the craziest thing I had ever experienced! I saw exactly where her cursor was and it was so much fun seeing her type up her sentences -- I never realized how much we sometimes STOP in order to think about what we should say next (or how we want to put our thoughts into words) and how much we end up deleting because of typing mistakes. The experience made me realize that I should've never been too scared to stay at home with a nauseating fever.... GoogleDocs was such a great tool for Whitney and I to communicate.  It was the best of both worlds: We were able to talk about the project and edit it at the same time. This experience with the lesson plan has definitely changed my resistance to technology/internet-based assignments tremendously from the way I felt about it earlier in the week... I'm not scared anymore *laughs*

As for the new websites introduced last week, Delicious and Glogster, I don't have much to say about them because I see no real benefits with these sites when it comes to teaching my math students. I have to say one thing, though: Whitney and I actually used her Delicious account in order to bookmark the websites that we wanted to use for our lesson plan! I remember when Whitney and her partner started to complete their wiki page on Delicious, and I think I remember us laughing about it because we had no idea there were websites out there specifically for people to save their bookmarks... little did we know that we would need to turn to Delicious in order to help us with an important project.

I think I'm getting used to this technology stuff. What a glorious day!