Google Sheets

Our tool was Google Spreadsheets, which I picked because I've never been very good with Excel, so I figured I should learn about Spreadsheets to make up for this deficiency in my life. It’s essentially the same as Excel, except that it’s free and part of Google Docs online, so it’s automatically better. Also, it can be shared and edited by multiple users at the same time, though if all the users attempt to edit at the same time, chaos ensues. Another little tidbit is that you can plug in Gadgets to your spreadsheet, which other people from the web have coded, though you can code your own Gadget if you have the ability, and add it to the list that people can pull from and embed into their own Sheets.

Increasing productivity and/or enhancing teaching and learning:
o The chat feature enables group members to chat from the comfort of their own homes, increasing their productivity because they don’t have to arrange a time to meet someplace, and don’t have to spend time going anywhere else to work.
o The group can each see for themselves how things work, and chat with each other about how to do different steps, asking for advice if they screw anything up really badly, and being able to go back in the document history to fix major issues.
o In a class, the teacher could show the students how to change something, and they could watch it change right in front of their eyes, and attempt to duplicate the teacher’s action, all in real time, with instant chat feedback from the teacher.
o In planning for events or meetings, each person could insert their idea into the sheet, and people could put their comments in by each idea, so that a sign-up list wouldn’t have to go around, and people wouldn’t have to sit around a table for hours discussing each item and what they think.

My learning curve was not really steep, but it was fairly steep early on when I watched Marta change things around, and then attempted to make changes to our graphs and insert Gadgets myself. Some parts we never figured out, but it really helped to have another group member on when I was trying things, and as we both searched for the way to merge cells together. I contributed to the group in adding ideas about what we could use the Spreadsheet for in terms of meetings and group projects in business, and I also figured out with Marta how to use Gadgets, as well as fixing some parts of our graphs, and figuring out how to merge cells.

Our final project can be found here.