I’m teaching a dual-enrollment freshman composition course through NVCC, the local community college. The course lets high-school seniors take the introductory college English courses in place of typical “English 12.” We’re fortunate enough to be working in a computer lab, so I asked the students to set up Google accounts and work with Google Docs. So far, I’m really finding this approach helpful. Here’s why:

• No papers: I love that I don’t have to carry around folders full of papers, some of them difficult to read or missing names, etc. Also, I don’t have to worry about forgetting to collect papers or missing one student’s submission. With Google Docs, all the writings are in my account, typed, and tied to the student who created the document.
• Collaborative assignments: These are obviously much easier using Google Docs, and the collaborations can even occur across classes. Besides providing for easy critique, I like playing the “fool me” game with various forms of writing. For example, I had students write two summaries: one of a belief that strongly hold, the other the opposite of that belief. If other students couldn’t tell which was which, then their summaries were sufficiently bias-free.
• Critique: I ask students to share most of their work with me and two other students as “collaborators.” That allows us to read and insert comments, and students get our notes as soon as we make them. I find myself making more substantive comments now that I can type them out. I also make fewer mini-corrections (because that’s more difficult than by hand), but I think that works as an advantage. Instead of correcting every comma, for example, I might say: “You’ve got some comma problems, particularly with comma splices.” Then the responsibility is on the student to look up the problem, find the errors, and correct them … or at least talk to me in person if he/she doesn’t know what I mean.
• History: Not only does each document have a history of revisions, but if students keep their files tagged with a course folder, they have a history of all their writing in the course. At the end of the course, when I ask them to write a metacognitive reflection of their development as writers, they’ll have all of their work on hand to help with their reflection.

Some problems and suggestions:

• Display names: The names beside the documents are listed as “ukonia034,” etc. I had the students change the display names, but this doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem. Anyone know why?
• Organization: I’ll admit that keeping track of all the files is a bit more difficult. In the paper version, I keep a folder for each section and clip together all the student papers for an assignment. I know I can do this with folders and subfolders, but I wish there were a way to automatically filter documents from certain users into particular folders.

Still, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks so far. Anyone else using Google Docs class-wide and have some tips?