Journal 7: Collaborative Documents

Collaborative Documents describes applications you can use to store information and work on projects together. These documents are usually private and one is invited to be included in the group. The documents may allow for concurrent editing like google documents or not, like Wiki.

The discussions under this category were great for getting sources for many collaborative documents. The source that received the most recommendations was google documents. It is easy to use with a good interface as we have discovered through this technology course. One teacher uses it for all written papers. The documents are shared with the teacher and he can quickly respond. He no longer needs to collect paper and schlep it around instead he can be anywhere to look over the assignments. It saves paper and the students don't need to carry around flash drives. Unfortunately, google, like many mail applications is often blocked from schools so unless you can get special permission or sign up for google applications for education it may not be a feasible option for primary or secondary students. There are other applications that also need an email address to sign up for the collaborative documents and again this will be prohibitive if the school doesn't allow mail. The alternative is finding a prepared site that only requires a password, such as Niceweb.

Facebook has a new application called Study Groups where you can create a secure collaborative document. If you want to create a collaborative newspaper or brochure you can go to ReadWriteThink Printing Press. Moonedit is another site that is competitive with google documents that also allows for real-time collaboration and each user is a different color. I highly recommend the reading more on the threads to find out many more options for collaborative documents.