My two sources of new technology are my husband and my students. It seems each week there is a new game, program, or gadget that is more interesting than me. This week my students found some Scrabble-like app that is not worth any more discussion and my husband found Google Wave. When I asked him what he was doing on the computer that was so much more important than doing the dishes, I didn't expect to be interested in the answer. However, I'm pretty excited to learn more about Google Wave.
My understanding of Google Wave is that is intended as a collaborative program. It is currently being rolled out by Google in a similar manner to the gmail rollout. One person receives an invite and then that person can invite a certain number of people. In the "wave" users can e-mail, instant message, and share pictures and documents. Users can invite other users who were not initially part of a wave to join the wave. Once a user joins a wave, they can playback the wave starting from the initial post in order to follow the conversation.
I see this particular program being very helpful with my team at school. We collaborate on tests, projects, and lessons all the time. Many times it takes us much longer than we would like to get something done because we have to wait until we can meet face to face to discuss. We've tried using the editing features in Word, but they get confusing after a while. Using e-mail can also become confusing if all the participants missed the original discussion. The wave would allow anyone joining the discussion to see all previous discussion. Users could also rewind the wave to see prior revisions.
Once I figure out how to use the wave with my colleagues, I'd like to try it with my students. I would have liked to use the wave when my students were collaborating on children's books. I think the quality of work might have been higher if the students had a central location to post, edit, and collaborate on the assignment when they could not work in the same room.
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