Concept Maps with Google Drawing Tools

Cristian Opazo, a Senior Academic Computing Consultant at Vassar College, recently posted an interesting article on the blog, RAIL:  RECIPES FOR ADVANCING INFORMATION LITERACY.

Cristian's post is about how Google drawing tools can be used to create concept maps.  At Colgate, we have had several professors use the Webspiration Concept Mapping tool with their students with some success.

Because all faculty and students now have the full suite of Google Apps at their disposal, the idea of using the Google drawing tools is very powerful as students would be able to collaborate both in class and out of class on the same concept maps.

Below is an excerpt from Cristian's post.  Click here to see the entire post.

"The drawing tools provided by Google Docs are very intuitive (think of a simpler version of Illustrator) and they allow you to do most anything you need as far as creating 2-D illustrations: stroke-and-fill shapes, freehand lines, inserting external images, etc. The library of shapes is generous (it features, for instance, 26 different types of arrows), and objects can be arranged into layers and grouped, masked, reordered, etc. The beauty of it all is that since it is natively generates vector graphics, you can create illustrations of arbitrarily large sizes that could be printed out poster-sized in all their vector-based glory. As a consequence, not only you can export your drawings as raster graphics (JPEG, PNG), but also as vector-based PDFs or SVGs. One particularly useful feature is the ability to insert links on your illustration, which takes you to the next level: creating hyperlinked images. This way, for instance, you can associate a URL to every concept in the map, so that when you click on the "Newtonian Mechanics" label, you are taken, for instance, to the respective page on Wikipedia (so you can read it, learn from it, and improve it!) In the best Google Docs tradition, of course, you can review the files history, so you can revert to a previous version just like that, and share your drawing with your collaborators for viewing, commenting or editing. Simply publishing the image file to the web is also possible, and very easy. "

Bookmarks and TOC in Google Docs

If you often work with a large document, you know that some times it can be difficult to navigate, especially if you aren't the only one working on it. Google provides two tools to make this navigation easier - Bookmarks and Table of Contents. Bookmarks can be defined within in a google document allowing you to create links to them within the document, enabling you to jump around and avoid scrolling . The Table of Contents tool relies on the document formatting and will convert all of the text designated as "Headings" into the topics of the Table of Contents. The topics generated are automatically linked to that section of the document.

I hope you found this post useful and if you'd like some help send an email to itshelp@colgate.edu. Here are some links to some Google help pages to get your started.

Table of contents

Bookmarks 

Google Docs Research Tool

Not too long ago Google released a research sidebar tool for Google Docs. It allows you to look up information while working on a Google Doc without having to open a new browser window. You enable it from the "Tools" menu and then do a general search or narrow the search down to images, scholar, or quotes.  Google even lets you filter your results by usage rights.   See picture on the right for a preview of what the tool looks like. 

Also right-clicking on any word in the document  and selecting "Research"  will display results in the sidebar regardless if the tool was on or off. If you look at the picture below you'll also the the ability to preview, insert a link and cite the link. If you cite the link it will automatically insert a footnote for you. 

View a short video on the research tool in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvsTdnHRYhM

As you get into using Google Docs and all of its collaborative features, keep this great research tool in mind. If you would to learn more about this tool ask your Instructional Technologist or email itshelp@colgate.edu

Google Forms

Google Forms is a tool that you can utilize to simplify the collection and organization of information. On campus we have used Forms as surveys, checklists, rosters, and a way to collect RSVPs. After you've created a form in Google Docs you share it and as people fill it out all the responses are collected in a spreadsheet by the same name. This saves having to sift through emails and manually creating a spreadsheet. I've linked a video of one of it's uses here at Colgate, and if you want more information on Forms or need help getting started send an email to itshelp@colgate.edu.