Get Ready For Google Wave

Get Ready For Google Wave

I just read an article titled “Get Ready For Google Wave”. I wanted to share this article because it talks about the up and coming free Google feature called Google Wave. This is going to be a 2.0 application that librarians and teachers could use within their classrooms to teach and collaborate. Google Wave is a program that is a mix between a wiki, blog, word processer, and instant messenger. This application has it all.

What makes Google Wave better than a plan old wiki or blog is the fact that everything is instant. For example, if a group of students are working on a wiki together, they can all be working on the wiki at the same time. There is no delay time that would normally occur when a person is working on a regular wiki. The delay time I’m talking about is the time that goes by while a person is making changes until they save their changes. Because changes to Google Wave are instant, it doesn’t require its users to save their changes, thus eliminating this delay time. Google Wave also allows the users to view a running history of who has contributed and did what on the documents. This is a great feature that would allow for teachers to evaluate student participation. Ultimately, this would help the teacher to determine who deserves the grades that they should get for their projects.

Google Wave is going to be a tremendous asset to teachers and librarians alike. It sounds almost like it was made to be geared toward people who have to collaborate together on projects. This would defiantly be students working on projects or librarians collaborating with other teachers on projects. I can’t until this great Google application is launched. It is supposed to be launched by the end of this year so only time will tell if it’s all that they make it out to be. However, I can’t imagine it not being. Google hasn’t let me down yet when it comes to meeting my technology standards and needs.

Christopher Harris. (2009, August). Get Ready for Google Wave. School Library Journal, 55(8), 12.      Retrieved September 24, 2009, from Social Science Module. (Document ID: 1814684491).