Thing 9: Online Collaboration Tools

This is a "thing" I've been anxiously awaiting. As a consultant to teachers who commonly require group work/presentations done on PowerPoint, I've often noticed the problems of saving work on flash drives, getting students together, setting up computer time in the media center--and related issues. Gaining access to collaborative online tools should be a tremendous benefit to both teachers and students.

For Reference:

• ZoHo Word Processor
  
• Google Docs

Which of the two tools would I recommend? Although they both appear clean and uncluttered, based on the homepage interface of each one, I'd have to give the edge to Zoho. Maybe it's just that I spent a lot of time with Zoho, but I'm impressed by it and would encourage students and teachers to use it as a collaborative tool. Some notes: Each user must register; the document must be saved in the read/write format; and each participant can IM the other while working on the document. Such immediacy creates a genuine sense of collaboration and the give and take of group decision making. As far as I can tell, Google Docs does not have the IM feature; on the other hand, it did seem to work better when I tried publishing documents to blogs.