New Google Docs Features for Students

Google Docs, Googles cloud computing suite of office tools, has added some back to school features they think will help students. For math, physics or engineering students, there is a new equation editor for completing math problems online and writing papers that have equations in them. Another new feature is the ability to write superscripts and subscripts, which algebra and chemistry students will appreciate.

Translation features have been available since late August that will automatically translate documents in to 42 different languages. Of course, Googles machine translation algorithms are far from perfect, so you wouldnt want to use these for writing assignments in your Italian class for example. A better use would be to double check words and phrases youre not sure of or getting the gist of a research paper from a foreign journal.

Other features recently added include an option in Google forms to Go to Page base on answer, to help in conducting a survey by allowing participants to see only questions relevant to them. Arts and humanities students will benefit from the new bulleting styles for lists in the formatting menu, helpful for outlining papers and reports. Printing footnotes as endnotes is now enabled as well, to easily print out a clean looking paper to turn in. What other features can you think of that might help students or teachers?