Formative Evaluation

Google Docs continues to be a focus of development. Today I tried a real-time collaborative research project with twelve students editing the same document at the same time. The end product was achieved but the means was not what I expected. The students, all editing the same spreadsheet at the same time, recognized very quickly that if they did not edit a particular cell first, their work was replaced with what ever was saved first. The students then began to save early and often. This worked for a short time but I saw several students simply allow others to do the work. In a future exercise, I would create a template and then have the students modify their own section of the template to produce the end results.