Bergkamp Brings Lessons to Students with GoogleDocs

For the last few years, Stan Bergkamp has been videoing his science lessons and sending them to Pretty Prairie and Stafford on DVDs so that these small schools can offer Physics to their students. Until recently, these videos served only that purpose. Now, with the use of Googledocs, Mr. Bergkamp uses his flipcam to upload the videos to Googledocs and share the links with these schools. He also puts the same link in his Blackboard course so that his students can review the videos at home for test review or review the class if they were absent. Bergkamp says, “With the difficult nature of physics, there was not a way to give a forty minute lecture in five minutes for a student who was absent. Now they can go back and access the entire lecture if they were absent or just go back and watch it as a review”.
The videos, for one block class could be up to an hour and a half in length. This is way too big to email to a student or upload into Blackboard without having issues. Googledocs allows users to share files from the Googledocs server so that anyone, anywhere can view it, as long as they have internet. The videos can also be downloaded as a local file on the computer on the other end.
“Hopefully, in the near future, we can encourage students to use Googledocs to save their own files. This would eliminate the need to use jump drives and allow students to access their information on any computer that has internet. It will also allow students access to their files indefinately”, says Jen Kern, Technology and Learning Coordinator for Maize. GoogleDocs is a free account, and allows anyone with an account 2 gigabites of free storage space. For $5.00 a year, a student can purchase 20 gigabites of space which is definitely cheaper than a jump drive!