Thing # 13 - Zoho Writer and Google Docs

This activity opened my eyes to a few more options of word processors. It was not hard to sign up for Zoho Writer, or even navigate through the site. I found it very user friendly. I currently use Microsoft Word for all of my word documents. However, the nice thing that I found about the Zoho Writer site was that you can create and save a word document within the site. Zoho Writer can be very helpful for storing important documents as well, because it also incorporates an import feature which allows you to upload previously created documents from other software into Zoho. Another feature that I like about Zoho is that it is interactive and allows you to share your work with others. Sharing a document can help with collaboration on a specific topic or it can even help in having someone proofread and make suggestions for your paper. As far as creating a header and setting the page layouts to a specific format, I didn't have any problems. If anything, I felt that the options that the Zoho word processor has are simple, limited to necessities, and not complicated to customize.

When it comes to Google Documents, I am already a pretty avid user. Like Zoho Writer, you are able to create and save documents. You are also able to upload and share or collaborate on documents with other users. One thing that I really love about Google documents is that it has read many documents for me that were unreadable due to a specific year of Microsoft word. For example, on my work computer I have an older version of Microsoft 2003 and at home I have the Microsoft 2007 version. There have been many times that I have had a professor upload a document into D2L that was not readable on my work computer because of the conflicting software. When I have had this issue, I have simply been able to save the "incompatible" document from the teacher on my work computer and then upload the file into Google documents to be read. This has saved me so much time and stress! On top of word documents, you can also make spreadsheets, forms, and even drawings. Below is the "drawing" that I was able to make through Google Documents.

Students are able to use Google documents in collaborative ways by sharing their word documents with others for such things as corrections or even to co-write a story or paragraph over the internet. Teachers would be able to use Google documents to create spreadsheets for their grade books or attendance. They could even design forms for parents using the form option. Lastly, teachers can utilize the drawing feature and create visual learning tools to use inside the classroom, like the one above. After exploring through both applications, I would have to say that I still prefer Google Docs. This is in part to do with that I already frequently use many different Google Applications every day, and find them very efficient. My main email is Gmail and Google documents is easily navigable from my main page. Although I do find Zoho Writer to be a nice online word processor and slightly more efficient when incorporating headers and formats, I feel that Google documents is just more convenient for me, specifically.