Google docs is part of the Google Apps for Education and it has been on the market for a while. Lately it has been through a lot of improvements. As an educator, I have used a lot of tools for writing. Blogs or blogging portals are very useful for this task. However, sometimes we do have some problems with these platforms because they require an e-mail. Young learners do have e-mails, but they never use it for nothing other than logging into social networks. The problem is that their passwords are attached to their home pcs or devices and they never remember it. Besides that, they also do not have the habit of checking e-mails.
A solution for solving this problem is getting rid of e-mails. Google docs is just the tool to allow you to do that. So, what I have been doing in some of my groups of young learners is to create docs for each individual student. I make these docs editable by anyone with the link. Next, I use bit.ly to shorten and customize the url. Once I am done with that process, I give them the url and teach then how to work in the document. The final result is a portfolio in which I can keep all their paragraphs for the whole semester. It is paperless, it is free of the hassle of losing first drafts, and gets the correction phase smoother. Finally, you add colors to the docs and kids love wrting on such neat digital stationary. Here is sample document from a project I am working on. Click here to browse it.
