Thing #19

I chose to explore Writeboard. It’s a collaborative writing and word processing tool. A document can be shared with a select audience, and they can work together adding, editing, and commenting on that document. The unique feature is that all former versions of the document can be seen. All editions are listed with the time they were made; a dot (by its size) indicates whether the edit was extensive or not. Items deleted from the version of a document are greyed out and struck through making it easy to see where changes were made. This is the feature that sets it apart from a wiki. Documents can be exported, and print can be copied into a document. Email addresses of those who will share the document are added, and they are sent an email with the web address of the document and the password needed for access. An RSS feed can be set up and alerts sent when someone makes changes.

This would be great for student work. Students could work in groups to produce a paper, and teachers could see who made changes and when. Or the whole class could participate in a project. It would be a great tool for planning school events, working together on lesson plans or schedules, and last but not least committee meetings. The only drawback I saw was that codes needed to be used for italics, bold, numbering columns, etc. There’s a formatting guide that can easily be seen when editing, and if some find that too complicated they can just leave out the formatting.