Saturday, July 08, 2006

Writing with online word processors

I am writing an article on online word processors for my state LaTESOL newsletter, and I decided to check out some of the features of Writely that I hadn't played with before. Posting to my blog is one of them. I am anxious to see how this works.

If you have ever used Writely, ThinkFree, Zoho Writer or Writeboard, I would love to hear your experiences.

I am not really sure why I would want to write my posts in an online word processor and then post them to my blog. I am not sure I see the reason for the extra step. But for people who work and rework their posts (like Miguel) I guess I can see it.

These tools are more important to me as another way for writers to collaborate. If we're not connecting with them, what's the point?

4 comments:

NYC TAXI SHOTS said...

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Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing about online word processors, Nancy! Nice seeing teachers like you taking advantage the latest tools available on the web.

About your query on why people need them, I think there are two reasons. One, an online word processor like Zoho Writer offers you a richer text editor than the one provided by your blog platform. Two, you need not login separately into your blog each time for posting - have all your word processing work, including posting to (sometimes multiple) blogs done from the online word processor itself.

Susan said...

Nancy,
I don't think I'd write my blog articles in an online word processor, but I have used Writely when working on collaborative projects. One project was drafting the syllabus for a course I was going to teach with a colleague who is not housed in my school.

A more impressive use was brainstorming and trying to answer interview questions we expected to be answering in an upcoming interview. We were both able to edit the document at the same time! Very powerful.

Anonymous said...

Since students can forget or lose disks, having an online word processor means never having to say "Oh, I left my disk at home." (Again).
As it is, alot of my students save to their email accounts these days.