Zoho writer now available in offline mode
Google Docs is great and even auto-saves your and your students’ work, but what about if and when your Internet connection goes down? Zoho have just announced that Zoho Writer now has an ‘offline mode’ for both reading and writing documents. Somewhat bizarrely, it uses software made by Google called Google Gears which the latter haven’t managed to integrate into their own offering yet!
Although Zoho does have a paid-for premium service, the basic account is free and ties in with Box.net for (free) extra file storage. It’s looking very competitive, especially with the recent updates to Buzzword…
(via Lifehacker)
Doug,
I really want to try using an online colaborative tool, right now I don;t care whether it is google docs, zoho or buzzword. The problem I have is that I keep getting told that I can’t have any interaction with pupils outside of the classroom. This means I can’t give them an email address to sign up for google docs, etc. How do you go about addressing the child protection issues associated with online collaboration. The current GTC (Scotland) consultation suggests that I live in a country that is never going to evolve beyond web1.0.
I feel your pain, Sinclair. The most persuasive argument you could use with management is to develop a VLE such as Moodle. School management can “see” the security more easily. With free online tools the security is far more difficult to be persuasive about. Even though, I imagine, your pupils are keen users of IM, myspace, piczo, etc, and are web 2.0-ing all night from home! Frustrating. My personal goal has been to be the Head of a school of my own. I start in January
First of all, congratulations Neil! Hopefully you’ll have a much more enlightened approach… 🙂
Sinclair, think about it from the other angle. Perhaps have a meeting with the Head/Principal or, depending on what type of school it is, get your Head of Dept. to put a letter together with you to send out to parents. So long as people know what’s going on I’m sure everything will be fine.
Clay Burrell’s modelled what he’s done regarding allowing parents to choose ‘privacy levels’ for their offspring: http://tinyurl.com/277rpl