Useful Google Docs Updates

Over the last 10 days Google has released a few updates that must be of interest to educators who use Google Docs. First, last week Google announced new options for searching and sorting your documents. In the past the only way to arrange your documents was chronologically according to the time of the last edit. Even though you put your documents into folders still the only way to sort was chronologically. Now you can arrange your document search by relevance or time stamp.

The 2nd enhancement to Google Docs announced previous week is a new option for exporting all of the contents of your Google Docs. You can now export all of your documents (up to 2GB, around 100,000 pages) at once.

At last, on Monday of this week Google announced a new co-editor option for Google Docs Presentations. The co-editor service permits users to simultaneously edit a presentation without stepping on each other's toes. When you use the co-editor for presentations you can see which slide(s) your co-editor is working on.

Applications for Education

The new "export all" option might be useful for students and teachers who would like to create offline copies of their documents with just a single click. The new co-editor for presentations might be useful for students who are developing group presentations. Students can collaborate without the frustration of trying to work on a slide that somebody else is trying to edit at the same time.