Monday, June 30, 2008

Google at NECC 2008

I am at the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) and attended a session conducted by two Google employees. In the Q&A after the session, I had the opportunity to ask the following question: "When am I going to be able to use my GMail space to store plain old documents?" The two of them whispered something to each other and then said something about having a policy not to talk about when unannounced products would be available. But then they said something like "Soon!" Hmmm...

On Sunday, I did a day-long workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Classroom-Based Assessment and Interactive Student ePortfolios. We started with a blog and them moved to Google tools (GoogleDocs Documents for creating artifacts, GoogleDocs Spreadsheet for creating a table to keep track of artifacts, GoogleDocs Presentation to create a linear presentation portfolio, and Google Pages to create a hyperlinked portfolio (without the interactivity of the GoogleDocs tools). One of the participants, who had been playing with the Zoho tools, and especially the Zoho Notebook, tried the Google Sites tools (released in February) and found it to meet his needs better than the other tool. I will need to try the Sites tool when I get home.

2 comments:

Kevin said...

There may not be anything official, but there have been several people that have developed 3rd party applicatins to store files on your gmail space. Here is a link to a few.

http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/08/11/utilities-to-use-gmail-space-as-google-drive/

eportfolios said...

That entry is from August 2007, and a lot has changed since then. I have discussed this issue in an earlier blog entry (February 2008 referencing a Wall Street Journal article in November 2007), which I should have noted here: http://electronicportfolios.org/blog/2008/02/web-20-tools-online-storage.html
I want a service that will allow each document to have a unique URI, so that I can link to it, which I am not sure is available in any of these 3rd party applications. I can get that feature in documents that I attach to a Google Page, but I just want a repository that I can draw from for an electronic portfolio.