No Google Docs but there are other options

[Sam Gliksman]

Pages is an acceptable word processor and simple enough to use on the iPad. It does have some annoying quirks such as having to switch between landscape and portrait mode in order to get the menus to appear.

If you use Google Docs a lot there are many apps that will allow you to read your Google Docs. There is currently one app that also allows you to edit your Google Docs. The app is Office Pro. It can be a little buggy but a new patch release recently fixed some of the problems I had been having.

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 Happy to update this discussion and announce that as of Nov 16th, 2010 the Google Docs editor now works on the iPad. You can log in directly and edit your documents. Features such as sharing and live editing are also supposedly supported.

[Perry Lund]

Office2Pro allows basic Google Doc edits and saves. Also there is an update to Pages to fix switch between portrait and landscape mode. Things are improving as time goes by.

[Sam Gliksman]

Hey Perry, Firstly, welcome to the group. It sounds like you have valuable knowledge and experience. I'm solution currently using Office2Pro and it's a reasonable solution - at least, the current version is a reasonable solution. The earlier version managed to garble every second Google document I opened :)

Perry Lund said:

Office2Pro allows basic Google Doc edits and saves. Also there is an update to Pages to fix switch between portrait and landscape mode. Things are improving as time goes by.

[Dan Hess]

Are there hopes that Google docs will actually function properly in the future? I want the students to be working together in remote locations using the iPad

(I used to use buzzword/Acrobat.com to have kids collaborate in real time)

[Sam Gliksman]

I hope so. Contrary to popular belief the problem isn't actually that the iPad doesn't support Google Docs - it's that Google Docs doesn't work on any mobile device. I'm sure that there must be a fix on the way soon especially as Google itself is now heavily invested in the mobile market.

Dan Hess said:

Are there hopes that Google docs will actually function properly in the future? I want the students to be working together in remote locations using the iPad

(I used to use buzzword/Acrobat.com to have kids collaborate in real time)

[Matthew Gaven]

Sam,

what issues have you had using Google Docs? Pages? I am tring to decide which would be easier to use with fifth graders. I want students to be able to save to a folder as well. Any advice...

[Sam Gliksman]

Google Docs doesn't work directly through a browser on the iPad. There are some 3rd party apps that will allow you partial access to your Google Docs - to both read and edit them. Office Pro is one and another is Documents To Go. While you cannot share your Google docs through these apps you can open and edit them ... and of course anything you create can be accessed through the regular Google Docs account interface on any other computer.

iWork is also an acceptable solution. If you want students to be able to get their documents outside of class then create an iWork web account for each student. They can upload their documents to their account when done and then log in anywhere with a web browser afterwards and get their documents.

Matthew Gaven said:

Sam,

what issues have you had using Google Docs? Pages? I am tring to decide which would be easier to use with fifth graders. I want students to be able to save to a folder as well. Any advice...