Monday, January 21, 2008

Week 8, #18

As I explore Zoho Writer, I have looked at the templates in particular. There are 5 resume templates available, designed for specific jobs in business. One, called Fresher, can be adapted for high school students to use either as part of a class assignment or when they are independently searching for a job. This feature is very useful, since the 4 resume templates that used to be on Word seem to have disappeared. Some of the other templates will be useful for a school: student homework schedule, student progress report and multiple choice test. I like the toolbar at the top of the writing screen, mentioned in the site introduction, that includes all the options, without having to select them under View.

The chief advantage of using Zoho Writer at my school will be to eliminate the problem students encounter when they create documents away from school using a different word processing software than our school uses. Since we have migrated away from students using floppy disks to carry their work to and from school, more of them are either using flash drives or email attachments to make their work portable. Even with their comfort at using computers to write their work (Do any of them even know what a typewriter is?), most do not realize the problems they will encounter when trying to open a document created in a different program than the one at school. At least several times a day I help students whose work looks like "Martian writing" at school when it was completely readable on the computer where it was written. Instituting a web-based application like Zoho writer would help eliminate these glitches. However, success depends on students having access to the internet away from school, which not all of our students have at their homes. So, while web-based applications eliminate the disconnect between various word processing programs, they do not level the playing field for those students whose home computer access, if any, may be limited to word processing only, without a printer and web access. They will still have to find internet-connected computers, such as those at the public libraries or a friend's house, but will be unable to write papers online in the middle of the night, a student tradition!
Another smaller glitch is that I read through the FAQ section, and discovered that Safari, one of the internet browsers on our school library computers, does not support Zoho Writer now in the beta version. We do have Firefox available for students in the library and it is supported by Zoho Writer, but this means students must be attentive to which browser they are using if they want to create accounts in Zoho Writer.
I also looked at the spreadsheet, presentation, meeting and other options available. I can see uses for the meeting option in particular at a school, sending the agenda and time specifics ahead of time without using any paper! Another way to be green!

1 comment:

Becca said...

Whatever happened to the district's notion of student "digital lockers"? Also, what benefits would you see to Zoho over googledocs? Furthermore, I thought most of the district (and the world) had migrated away from Safari as a browser--not true? Lastly, what about the notion of saving docs (for those without internet access at home) as rtf's? Why do I have so many questions?