My AS micro group this week has been collaborating on an assignment on minimum wages using Google Docs. My stuents are becoming more adept at building arguments and editing and amending the contributions of others. We are limited in not having wireless access in the classroom - if we did students could enter, log in and work as a group in real time with the document being displayed on a screen and I could monitor their contributions and add in ideas and comments as we go.

Nonetheless I am going to perservere with this approach because it is fascinating to see how this type of assignment can evolve during a course. We stayed clear of analysis diagrams in the Google Doc - although there is a draw function available within the program. Collaborating on the essay as a homework meant that I could cover the minimum wage issue in a single lesson reflecting and drawing on points already made in their own group document. It also gave a little more time to concentrate on how to improve evaluation skills.

A good collaborative document can then be printed out (it converts automatically into a pdf document) and inserted straight into class notes and folders.

Here is the published version as a pdf file
Google_Doc_Minimum_Wage.pdf