Collaborating on Live Notes: Sounds as Fun as Doodling!

I am yet to confess my love for Google on this blog, ain't I? For me, it's all things Google! I use a lot of Google products extensively - that includes Gmail, Google sites, blogger, Google docs, calendars, maps, Earth, Chrome, Picasa, Google Talk and of course, our beloved search engine. The amazing interface, simplicity and functionality of Google products continue to impress me.

Google Docs and Sites are THE BEST if you want to collaborate on projects or schoolwork or anything else. Why so? It's free, functional and awesome \(^_^)/. Yesterday, I found an article by a student which had really innovative uses for Google Docs, you should try it sometime too! 

Here's a snippet:

.... Take notes collaboratively 
My classmates and I always get together near exam time to combine our notes and share ideas, so why not do it in real time? I work with friends to take in-class notes on a single Google doc, allowing everyone to come away with a more thorough set of notes than they could have written individually. I discuss this concept in more detail on my blog, HackCollege. 

Read the complete article here.  

It's this particular use of Google Docs for taking live notes that I find intriguing. For those of you who haven't actually been introduced to Docs, let me tell you how this works. Say I create a document on docs and share it with a friend so we can collaborate. Now my fellow collaborator and I may log onto our doc and edit it at the same time. Yes, at the same time. Our cursors will blink in different colors and we can edit our document together, live. There's also a little chat sidebar so we can leave a quick message. 

Our innovative college senior, Shep McAllister uses this functionality of Google Docs to take notes in class, collaboratively. Everybody logs in to the shared document, is delegated a particular section of the notes to take down. I know, cool! You can read more about this concept here. 

I wanna try this out too! Though it's a pity we're not allowed to take our laptops to school, let alone connect to the internet. Aah, I'll just have to wait till college. What about you?

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