Thing #18 - Online Productivity Tools

I went into exploring this activity with a negative mind. I worked for a school district that had went away from Microsoft Office and subscribed the whole district to another tool that was supposed to be interactive. We had a lot of problems with student work created at home that was Microsoft Office with it converting to the other program. Teachers also had problems as well. As you can imagine, it made it hard for me as the librarian and technologists at the time to help people. It was very frustrating. But, I thought I would explore at least one of the free tools. I like the word "free" if really does work. I decided to explore Google docs because I already had a google account. It worked very nicely. I created a spreadsheet and a word document using it and I had no problems. Everything seemed easy. I saved them on my account. Tomorrow is going to be the catch all. I am going to go up to school and try to open these documents and use them at school. I will print them out and see how that works. I felt like it worked nicely and I can store the documents from home on google docs and then open them at school. I still like Microsoft Office because I am so use to it. I don't want anything to go wrong with the two different programs interacting. I would think that it would be the worse disadvantage if there was a problem with the two programs interacting. It will be interesting to see and another tool that we can use.