Adobe (of Acrobat Reader [pdf] fame) has gotten into the online apps game. And, in my opinion, it debuts at number one. This thing is fantastic. Much richer functionality than any of the others, including Zoho (which almost made me fall in love with it, the cad!). If you want something that works more like a word processor than anything else, use Adobe Buzzword. Now the menus take about 45 seconds to get used to. They don't look exactly like what you're accustomed to, but you'll quickly get the hang of it and see the similarities. Buzzword claims compatability with Word, but I haven't checked that out yet to see if it's better or worse than Google Docs and Zoho (to be honest, though, it would be hard for it to be clunkier than the Google Docs compatability).
It has all the things you need for online collaboration, including strikethrough, highlighting, and a comment function. What I like so much more about Buzzword's commenting function than the other online apps is that you don't have to click a bubble to see the comment. The comment just stays in the margin in a bubble (much like Word 2003). You can hide the comments, too, if you want to read the doc without that distraction.
More importantly, the resulting on-screen document looks more like a word processing document than a web page. In other words, you see the page breaks, and they appear automatically without you having to insert them, as you do in Google Docs and Zoho.
To get started with Buzzword, just go to the link in the first paragraph and sign up for an account.
You won't be sorry.
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1 comments:
Great news about Adobe. Although shifting between Google Docs and Word creates some difficulties, I agree that these apps provide a useful tool for courses.
I used Google Docs with my upper-level Remedies course this past spring as a tool for groups to write memos for problems in the casebook. I was surprised at first by how many students seemed intimidated with using a system they had never heard of; when I said it was a "wiki," most had no idea what I meant. Many claimed they had not even heard of "Wikipedia." As soon as I realized they had limited knowledge (and comfort level) with the idea, I spent a small amount of class time using a computer and the Internet, projected onto a large screen, showing them how it worked. At the same time, I had some of the students access a Doc, which I had previously created and invited them to be a collaborator on, from their own laptop in class, allowing them all actually to see the changes to the Doc as different students made them. After that, things went well, and they were able to collaborate on group writing assignments without worrying about the difficulties of coordinating various 3Ls' work, class, and personal schedules.
(Also, I agree completely with that advice in an earlier post about being flexible. When students knew that I knew they were learning a new process, and thus, expectations were made accordingly, they seemed much more comfortable with trying something new.)
Jana R. McCreary
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