25 tips for Students and Teachers Using Google Wave

Another good link from James Atkinson.  Many of us have had the opportnity to have a play with Google wave but this list brings together some great ideas of how to use this unknown quantity in education.  Check it out here and I would love to hear any great success you have had with Google Wave.

Some Possible uses of Google Wave in Education sor far.

I came across this great article from Richard Mcmanus at Readwriteweb which explores what some early adopting educators have experienced with wave so far.

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September.

Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.

What is Google Wave Again?

A quick reminder of what Google Wave is. In a nutshell, Google Wave is a new form of real-time communications. Google describes it as "equal parts conversation and document." In our first 'hands-on' post at the beginning of June, we described it as "real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in" - although we noted that "this only describes a small part of what Wave can do."

In a recent CNN profile, Wave creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen described it as making email "collaborative and instant."

Wave in Class

After searching some public 'waves,' we came across an educational wave. Entitled 'Wave in Class,' this wave was started by Loren Baum (a self-described "collaborative learning enthusiast" and graduate student at Ben Gurion University) and Sam Boland (a Politics student and "Tech Enthusiast" at Occidental College, Los Angeles).

The wave was started to explore concepts like "Collaborative Note Taking" and "Wave as a Debate Host." Nearly 100 people are included in the wave, ranging from teachers to PhD students to IT professionals to high school students.

This particular wave was framed at the start as being "a set of collaborative documents, supported by a chat."

As a note-taking tool, Samuel Boland wrote that "there appears to be a concensus that this [Google Wave] will work as a note-taking tool, the only disagreement is over how to implement it." Options for note-taking include voluntary extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and small in-class groups.

A few users enthused later in the wave that "Google Wave combines a lot of the best features from different applications" - but with a real-time twist. It was noted that while Google Docs can be used to share notes and collaborate on assignments, with Google Wave students can collaborate in real-time. This could be important in education for things like notetaking, asking questions (a.k.a. a backchannel) and collaborative projects.

Another feature of Wave that would be useful for education purposes, according to this 100-person wave, is the play-back ability - "so instructors can see exactly who did what, and see the progression of ideas."

Will Wave Make Students Lazy?

One concern that seemed to pop up several times in the wave was that Google Wave could make it too easy for lazy students to get by. As Justin Neitzey succinctly put it: "I don't think kids should be allowed piggy back off the work of others."

This is a similar concern that some in the education system had with Wolfram Alpha, another innovative Web tool that is set to change the way education is delivered.

Docverse - The Easiest way to collaborate on Office Docs for the Moment

Docverse is one of the most impressive applications I have seen for a while.  It seamlessly lets a group of people share any Microsoft Office document; solving the problems of uploading and downloading emails and having multiple copies of files floating around.  The video below will demonstrate how it works on both windows and Mac far better than I can in words.

This is going to get some serious competition from Google Wave but remember it is targeted at MS office users and not Google Docs.  But the real question is what is office 2010 going to bring to cloud with it's next release.  Microsoft have definitely got the capacity to bring this all its users successfully today as proven with office live and applications such as this but hey are very cautious not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg for the minute. 

I realise there is a growing glut of these out on the market but nevertheles it is highly impressive and definitely worth checking out here.