Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Thing #18, Week 8

Zoho Writer...

During a region workshop at REV in January, Becky Johnston showed us zoho and how to use it. At that time I set up an account and played with it a bunch. I knew instantly that this was something that would benefit my students. So many of them use MS Works at home then come to school and cannot open their files because they don't know to save it as a rtf document. By using zoho, they can access their work from any computer with internet access, work on it, save it, open it somewhere else and edit or print. Very cool!!

Of course when I got to school the following Monday I found that zoho was blocked. Again, it amazes me how many valuable sites are blocked for no apparent reason. Luckily, my IT guy is very good with opening sites that I request without any hassle. I know some districts will not open sites for any reason which I find ridiculous!

I like that zoho allows users to share documents similar to a wiki. This is obviously the way collaboration is going as more and more of us have less time to meet face to face to work on projects. It amazes me how many cool tools there are available on the web for free. There was a time when a program like zoho cost a pretty penny.

On a side note, the link from the SLL2.0 blog did not work for me. It came up as a bad site. I think they have changed the url since the blog was created. Maybe the powers that be can check on this and fix it for others working their way through the 23 Things.

5 more to go....

2 comments:

Jackie S, 2.0 project manager said...

Your faithful SLL2.0 project manager checked the links to Zoho and they all worked. Not sure why you had trouble other than maybe your district was still blocking it -- anyway, all seems fine. Thanks for the "heads up."

NHS Librarian said...

You are on the ball!! It must have been my crazy firewall, but thanks for checking. I should have known better than to question you! :o)