One of my Year 12 micro groups used Google Docs for the first time as a collaborative written assignment this week. Their topic was the economic impact of the car scrappage scheme both in the UK and other countries. They soon got to grips with the spirit of the process and I feel after a couple more opportunities they will be more confident at editing, amending and developing ideas and arguments together as a group using this super collaborative tool. Details of their results are below.

This week Google Docs has launched mobile apps for their software - details here

Several governments in Europe have introduced special consumer subsidies to help their motor industries. In 2009 the UK government launched a vehicle scrappage scheme co-funded with the car industry that had the objective of increasing the demand for cars in the UK. Broadly, it enabled consumers to scrap vehicles older than ten years provided that they had owned the car for at least 12 months to replace them with new vehicles at a discount of £2,000. The scheme was introduced in May 2009 and ended in March 2010

Evaluate the economic arguments for and against the government providing a consumer subsidy to the UK car industry.

The Google Doc can be found here as a pdf file
AS_Micro_Car_Subsidies.pdf