Educators in Portugal, México, and Germany speak out

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 6:22 PM

Several months ago, Joelle asked teachers to tell us how they've been using Docs in the classroom. We received stories from professors and instructors all over the world. In today's post, I'd like to highlight three specific educators from México, Germany and Portugal:

Jose I. Icaza is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey N.L., México. He teaches courses in Leadership for Sustainable Development.

"I use Docs documents to have my graduate students write bibliographic research reports coauthored by them all. As an example, in the course 'Leadership for sustainable development,' my 15 students recently wrote together the report Sustainable communities and cities: cases and plans. Each student was to find out about a planned or real sustainable place, incorporate his or her findings into the report and improve the overall report with the instruction: 'Leave the whole report better than you found it.' Grade for this activity depended both on the quality of the individual contribution and the quality of the whole finished report. It was so good that we then hit 'publish' and here it is [in Spanish]."

Stephan Rinke is a subject area manager in the languages department of Volkshochschule Essen, an adult education college in Essen, Germany. He was also an early contributor to our community channel on YouTube.

"We often use Google Docs in our language courses to give students the opportunity to improve their writing skills cooperatively. Frequently we create Google Documents as a basis for group work. Typical activities include:

• making a boring text more interesting by adding more detailed descriptions as well as adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
• changing the tense of a text to practise grammar (e.g. changing a text from present tense into future tense)
• spotting and correcting mistakes (e.g. wrong verb endings, typical misspellings, etc.)

Students find these tasks motivating and also create class notes and longer documents collaboratively. And with Google Docs being web-based, students often use the opportunity to complete their group tasks from home. Google Docs plays an important role in our efforts to promote cooperative learning."


António Oliveira teaches Information Systems at IPCA (Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave) in Barcelos, Portugal.

"My name is Pedro Oliveira and I'm giving a class of information systems on IPCA (Barcelos, Portugal). In the last semester, all my students delivered a document (done in groups of two students) with their final work. They liked very much the possibility of using Docs to work in the same document, without having the problem of managing the versions, worries about the security and backup plus. One of the main features that I found was the ability of following their work (each group gave me access to the document), since the first day, inserting comments along the documents and giving clues to the students. Moreover in the end all of their work was published (with a click) and presented to the student community. All I want to say is thanks for the excellent tools that you have and keep up the excellent work."

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager