Autodesk Inventor trial and Google Docs

Well, I signed up for a 30-day free trial software package from Autodesk Inventor which should arive in 2 to 3 weeks. I'm not exactly sure if I'll have time to look at it too closely before the summer, but we'll see. Also, I might be able to get the actual software package free through FIRST Robotics--I'll check with my engineer.

After reading the text and looking at this week's videos, I have looked into Google Docs as a vehicle for collaboration--students can look at, comment on, and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents online from different computers at the same time or asynchronously. The key here is that it would result in the creation of a single document by the members of a team, and document participation in the creation of the "product" (at least I think it does--maybe someone can straighten me out here...). This would ensure that each team member is an active participant in making the PowerPoint that a team will be responsible for.

So far, I have discovered that my browser must be updated from IE-6 to IE-7 to take advantages of all of the frills Google Docs has to offer. I uploaded an old PowerPoint just to see how it worked, and it uploaded all right, but doesn seem to have all the animation of the original. The initial memory capacity for a new account is 1024 MB, and it appears that it can be increased. In the next few weeks I will see how Google Docs is managed. For example, how do students share documents in such a way that outsiders can't mess with 'em. Can I look at them as they are created by my students? Can I comment on 'em? These are all questions that some of you may be able to answer for me!