Thing # 13

I played around with Zoho Writer for a while and a few of the features I found that could be really helpful are the features under Mailings. They have, what appears to me, a simplified way to do Mail Merges. Zoho also has almost all of the things that a standard word processing application has and is set up very similar to Microsoft Word, which I find to be helpful. They're not trying to reinvent the wheel and make things extra complicated for their users. Another feature I really liked about Zoho is that it gives the writer the option to publish it straight to their blog. I could see many uses for collaboration among students, in small groups, with the option of sharing their final project through a class blog for everyone to access and view.

I chose to make a drawing with Google Docs. Although my drawing isn't the best, it allowed me to play with a couple of different features before I published it. I didn't bother looking for instructions, I just kind of started hitting buttons and I was really pleased with how easy it was to navigate and do what I wanted to do, like hide the cat behind the arrow. I also really liked how they gave you the option to make the lines dotted, which seems like you would be able to use this application to create  images for the students to color and cut out.

I can see many uses for students to work collaboratively with Google Docs. For example last semester in one of my classes we had a major group project due. Part of this project included presenting to the rest of the class. I know that one group used Google Docs to share resources, complete their group paper, and create a presentation to share for the class. They talked about how they were able to work together without having to meet and that Google helped to facilitate this. 

I think I like Google Docs more simply because I am more familiar with Google than I am with Zoho. I'm more likely to return to Google because of the ability to flow easier among different aspects of Google (Gmail, Blogger, Google Docs, etc) than Zoho.