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Passing the Google Docs Exam

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Google has introduced Google Apps for Schools and created a certification of sorts for this suite of applications. This series of certification exams can show your ability to teach, configure, and support Google Apps for Schools. In this article, Joe Phillips explores the Google Docs exam and describes what you need to know to pass.
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This education exam will test your knowledge to use, configure, and manage the suite of Google Docs applications. In case you're not familiar with the suite, Google Docs is the online, in-the-cloud answer to the powerful Microsoft Word. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation editor, and form editors.

While you won't need to know the ins and outs of every program to pass this certification exam, you'll need to be familiar with how teachers and students will use these applications in their school. You can follow prep for this exam by using the software and reading the free on-line resource from Google: http://edutraining.googleapps.com/Training-Home/module-4-docs.

Let's examine the exam objectives for the Google Docs exam:

Introduction to Google Docs

Think back to all the writing you had to do in school: creating book reports, taking notes, and writing love letters to that special someone just three lockers away from you. Google Docs allows you to accomplish all this work with more control, more collaboration, and teacher interaction. With Google Docs you can create reports, share progress, and collaborate in real-time on projects. You can, if you want to, create love notes.

This exam objective will test your understanding of what Google Docs can do for teachers and students. You'll need to identify how Google Docs allows real-time collaboration on documents, including editing, chat, and comments.

Because Google Docs are web-based, this means there's no local sharing of the applications, but everything is online. Users can travel to school to Grandma's house and then home, and still have access to their work—as long as there's a web connection.

If you're the IT administrator for a school, you're familiar with the pains of managing multiple software applications, compatibility, and communications between PCs, Macs, and even Linux. What a student works on at school isn't always easily compatible with what they may use to continue working at home. Because Google Docs is web-based, the local operating system doesn't matter—a huge selling point for teachers and students that enroll in the program. Google Docs can also convert files from that other suite of productivity tools into its format and management.

Autosave and revision history is a big selling point for students and teachers, so you can expect this feature to be on your exam. With this feature, work is saved as it is created, but users can still revert to previous drafts and versions should they want to.

Sharing work between users is possible through shared folders and built-in collaboration features. And, as you might expect from any document[nd]editing software suite, there are also templates users can use to save time and headaches.

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