Chapter 3 - Don't Be Evil: How Google Built its Culture Q2

[Alauna Thornton]

2. Google admires liberty and acts with minimum authority. This free spirit led the company to design creative products. Among all Google’s services or products, which is the most innovative design? Which is most influential for education

[Beverly Pell]

Among all of Google's services, I cannot say which is most influential for education because I'm not sure it's been invented yet! :)

So far, the search engine is the greatest. Chrome is more user friendly than ever (e.g., able to search anything from the address bar). YouTube is incredibly helpful, and KidTube has great potential (though I haven't used it). Oh, and then there's Google Books! Guess that's pretty helpful, too.

[Christopher Simpson]

I think the most influential tool google has made for education is Google Scholar. It has changed the way people can search for academic articles to use in research online. Not every educational institution will have access to databases of articles, which are usually quite expensive. Google Scholar is able to find content relevant to what you are searching for, which can be limited to just articles that are not behind paywalls. However if you are at a university or a public library, google scholar can be built to work with the databases you can access. Instead of having to look through all the databases one at a time you can just search in google scholar and have access to all of them at once.

As far as what Google's most innovative desgin is, I would have to go with Google Docs. As far as I remember they were the first one to create word processing, graph editing, and picture editing all completely online. The innovate part of google docs is how easy it is to use. Anyone with an internet connection now has access to word processing software. Since it is web based, it have very low system requirements, which basically means if you have internet you have a full useable version of Office completely for free. I could see that being used to provide tools to people in disadvantaged circumstances. The best part is that you only need to connect to the internet once. Google docs is useable offline as long as you have chrome and initially visited the site.

On Wednesday, March 11, 2015 at 6:32:37 PM UTC-5, Alauna Thornton wrote:

[abartleKU]

One of the most innovative products that Google has developed is Google Drive. It allows true collaboration.  People can access documents that are stored in the cloud and make updates. Updates can be seen in real time. It really saves time for teams of people who need to work on projects together. No other product on the market today comes close to the type of flexibility that Drive provides. Documents can be viewed on multiple devices (tablets, laptops. smartphones) and can be shared in real time to anyone. 

On Wednesday, March 11, 2015 at 6:32:37 PM UTC-5, Alauna Thornton wrote:

[Alauna Thornton]

I would agree Google Drive is very innovative.  This semester, I have experiences some of innovative collaborations.  I appreciated how we could annotate updates on documents with in a shared google drive.  As you mention, these documents can be view on multiple devices.  It can be accessed almost anywhere there is internet access.  This is remarkable.