I am a digital biologist, teacher, and entrepreneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology (
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Poor PZ! Stranded without a working laptop in a strange town! This is the kind of situation that gives me nightmares, so I like to upload presentation materials to the web just in case.
Lately, I've been looking at different methods for doing this to see which ones l like the best.
A few days ago, I tested this with Scribd.
Today, I'm going to see what we can do with Google Docs.
TomJoe said that he started using Scribd because he couldn't share things with Google.
I use Google docs quite a bit, but I haven't tried to share any documents with more than a few people, so I took at look.
You can have your pdfs but you can't share them with everyone
I uploaded a pdf document to Google Docs, then clicked the How to share link.
Too bad. Pdfs are like a child's birthday party, you must e-mail invitations to everyone.
Big waste of time.
So using Google docs isn't very helpful if you have a pdf that you'd like to share. But what about other kinds of documents?
Things you can share
It is easy to share Forms, Power Point presentations, and Spread Sheets. With text documents, you can publish them as web pages. All you need to do is click the Share tab in the upper right corner, and then choose Publish/Embed from the list.
Here's a Power Point document that I chose to share and embed:
It works!
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Mac has a MobileMe iDisk, on which you can store all kinds of files, and access them from anywhere. There's also a Public folder, from which you can share documents and files with others. I haven't tried the Public folder sharing function, but I have downloaded files while "on the road" (e.g. at study section). My iDisk worked quite well, and I should try the sharing function, with data and manuscript drafts for some of my research collaborators.
I used to have a very unreliable laptop, and colleagues have had bad experiences with flash drives failing unexpectedly. Therefore, I carry seminar and lecture presentations on at least two different flash drives (in addition to my MacBook Pro), and make sure that I could also access the crucial files on the iDisk, or from a Gmail attachment. Overkill perhaps, but I've never been caught out. And through lots of practice in doing anatomy, embryology, and neuroscience tutorials, I can draw quite well on a chalkboard or dry-erase board.
Posted by: Barn Owl | November 15, 2008 8:37 PM