David Black posted on February 11, 2007 07:42
The advantages of services such as
Google Documents. One does not need to transfer these documents between home and work computers. Collaboration with colleagues is easy by sharing these documents through the use of a Google account. And with Internet access, particularly through wireless connections outside of the workplace, becoming a standard part of life, your documents are always available.
However,
Google Documents does have its limitations. I find the interface clunky, particularly when adding special features, such as bulleted lists. In addition, right now only spreadsheets and word processing documents may be created.
Fortunately, there are other services vying for attention in this fast-growing market. The
Teaching Every Student blog
posted a list of online productivity tools that may be used. From that list, I decided to give
Zoho a try.
The first thing I noticed when visiting
Zoho is that there are far more applications available. In addition to online documents and spreadsheets,
Zoho adds presentation software, database creation, interactive tools such as wikis, and a host of other features.
Since I'm most interested in document creation at this point, I opened the Zoho Writer to give it a try. I was pleased with what I found. The interface is far superior to
Google Documents, with clear toolbar buttons, tabs, and menus. I was more easily able to create a document that was both functional and attractive with a minimal amount of fuss. I could go into a lot more detail about this product, but it would be far better for you to take the time to try it out itself.
So what are the implications of online productivity tools for education? We'll look at that next step in tomorrow's post.