Google docs: an effective collaborative tool for graduates to perform academic activities in the cloud

Academic writing, individual or collaborative, is an essential skill for today's graduates. Unfortunately, managing, writing activities and providing feedback to students is very labor intensive and academics often opt out of including such learning experiences in their teaching. Successful integration of educational technology is a complicated process that is influenced by multiple factors (Levin & Wadmany, 2008; Valcke et al., 2007). Recently, both within and across schools, educators have been searching for cloud-based solutions to address the challenges of integrating educational technology into their school systems ─ assessing whether these programs are affordable, accessible, and well-suited to improve learning. While the popularity of cloud-based applications among educational institutions and students is rapidly increasing due to their enhanced sharing features, accessibility, and cost-efficiency, there have been few efforts to investigate the impacts of these cloud-based applications in educational settings. The Internet giant offers a suite of Web-based productivity applications under the name Google Docs (GoDs). Google Docs is the ability to share and collaborate with others in “real time.” Each user saves information to the cloud system, he or she can access the same file from anywhere. In online collaboration, multiple users can make edits to the same files at the same time. The objective of this paper is to highlight the various collaborative tools and the importance in doing the academic activities collaboratively.