Lifehacker sends us Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps. I have got to study this to understand all the ways, once set up and understood, to make these apps work for me.

Knauff said self-publishing tools are an enticing way to get college students to develop original thoughts as opposed to simply repeating what they think professors want to hear. Students are collectively creating glossaries and repositories for academic articles, audio files and videos.

“They write for their peers as well and it creates a different motivation. They want to do well, don’t want to look phony and get excited about the projects with the media aspect,” said Knauff.

The multimedia or personal stuff that professors may think of as flashy filler is getting students to make an emotional investment in their education. “Sure, the content they offer is not as good as if a faculty member produced it. The content expert is always going to be better at creating the content, but that’s not the point,” said Knauff.

And it goes beyond blogs replacing reading journals for undergrad American lit classes. Dartmouth’s medical school students use wikis to author, share and critique case studies.