5410 - Week 7 - Activity

I choose to review Google Docs and Google Sketchup.

I did not know anything about Google Sketchup when I first heard of it other than what I could infer from the title. I assumed it was something like a free photoshop. When I got to the website, I saw that it is an actually download that you put onto your computer and installed it. It is not really anything like photoshop however. It is more like a scaled down version of CAD. There are a lot of great videos and tutorials that pop-up when you first open the program after installing it. However, drafting has never been one of my strong suits and even the great videos were not able to help me draw anything great with the time that I was willing to spend. Some of the great features that I noticed though were that you could “paint” your drawing with a variety of different textures such as brick, blinds, roofing, windows and all sorts of other neat things. Google also tries to guess what you were trying to draw and make the aspect correct for you, but I also seemed to fail at communicating what I wanted to do to google. After seeing me struggle, a co-worker told me that his girl friend has been using it for quite some time. He told me how you can animate your drawing to come apart so you could, for example, show a completed house, then take the roof off to zoom inside and see the inside of the house. This program can also be used with Google earth to make cities and buildings 3D.

Although I do not know much about these types of programs, this one seems very robust and intuitive and with the price tag of free… it’s a great deal.

My friends and co-workers all think I should get royalties for as much as I talk about google docs and how awesome they are! I use google docs for everything now. It is so much easier than remembering a USB key, plugging it in, waiting for it to load..etc (especially for those of us that have those stupid dells with the slanted ports). I keep our budget on there so I have access wherever I am and so my husband can see it at any time. I have used it for group projects and I have used it to share ideas with people. The newest discovery that I have found with google docs is that they now have a forms capability in google spreadsheets. You can make your own surveys and sent it out to people through email or by link and the results will go directly to your spreadsheet which you can share with as few or as many people as you would like. I even created a timeclock one for my student employees so they can keep track of the hours they have worked. I gave them read-only access to the spreadsheet so they could see when they punched in and out.