My experience with GoogleDocs as a collaborative text tool has been quite frustrating. The fact is I’ve never had a problem when using GoogleDocs on my own, as a word processor or when sharing the document with someone else. But when I tried to use GoogleDocs as a classroom tool, mayhem ahead. After getting over the shock of realizing that 90% of my digital native students didn’t know what GoogleDocs was, problems started when they started to add collaborators to their projects. More than 15/20 mins of class time was spent in overcoming the hassle of signing up, activating account, etc. Some of them, who incidentally didn’t have a Gmail account, got locked out. Welcome to GoogleDocs, collaborative hurdling.
Via gotoweb2.0 feeds, I came across Etherpad and DoingText. DoingText is currently beta-invite (I have 10 invites, just leave a comment below if you want one).
DoingText main claim: “No login required”.
Well, actually, you need to sign up and login to paste/create your own discussion but it’s true that you don’t need to have an account to start editing someone else’s text (unlike GoogleDocs).
To create/start your own editable text:
- Sign up + log in
- This is what I see when I log in:
- This is the “Discussion window”:
Changes in lines are color-coded, thus showing the difference between versions: green is for insertions and red for deletions. Comments are also differentiated with colors: the comment balloon is dark green when you’re the author of the comment and dark orange for collaborators.The older the comment is, the paler the color is.
- Commands: share, history, download, presentation:
If you click on share:
You’re given the link to share your text with others (who won’t need to sign up/log in to work on it). Regarding the permissions, if you click on “Publish” you make it “public” and will appear in the site wide search (you can undo this option). You can also lock your doc by setting a password and then you would need to add your collaborators manually (”Add collaborators”).
If you click on “Download”, you can export your text to txt, pdf or xml (this one including the comments). “History” gives you all the edits, comments, etc. You can also keep track of this by subscribing to each discussion’s feeds (which will show up to 50 comments at once):
Positive things:
- Easiness of use.
- OpenID registration.
Negative things:
- Easiness of use at the expense of maybe too simplistic features: can we collaborate on texts with objects, pics, etc. or those “advanced” features are only for GoogleDocs?; formatting is time consuming and a pain for those who don’t want to care about code and the like, I miss some sort of wysiwyg editor.
Future: translation into Spanish? tool’s integration into educational/learning environments?
I wonder if there’s something like this for “powerpoint/keynote/impress” presentations. Any suggestion?
PS: And now I’m going to give Etherpad a try, I know it has more features such as real-time chat. We’ll see.
www.qwabi.ru
13 Comments
Me parece una herramienta de lo más útil. Parece sencilla, está bien resuelto el tema de los permisos, tiene una interfaz muy agradable…
Personalmente, Google Docs no es santo de mi devoción, así que alternativas son bienvenidas (no quiero pensar el día en que Google empiece a cerrar sus servicios).
Lamentablemente, no conozco alternativas como esta para presentaciones.
I would like an invitation, please!!!
Hola Víctor,
Pues la verdad es que no estaría mal para las presentaciones, muchas veces el trabajo de los estudiantes en grupo lo reflejan luego en algún tipo de presentación y claro hacerlo con GoogleDocs es un dolor de cabeza. Falta algo así para presentaciones.
Lo de la invitación: te la mando al email que has puesto al dejar el comentario (así q si es falso…;) ) Y porque lo has pedido en inglés de Michigan.
hi victor,
thanks for that getting started guide, something that has definitely been missing on doingtext. we are working on it.
if you could be a bit more specific about ” integration into educational/learning environments” that would be great. would you mind sending me an email about that? we’d be happy to make doingtext easier to use for education.
you can insert images into a text using textile (i know it’s not as easy as wysiwyg – sorry we haven’t found a viable alternative yet) by pasting the url of an image and surround it with exclamation marks.
you can also use doingtext for presentations with the presentation link at the top of a discussion. more about that in the guides.
Hi Alex,
The author of the post (= blog’s owner) is me, i.e. Elena (Benito-Ruiz).
I work as a lecturer and freelance and I’m pretty much related to elearning, that’s why I always end up thinking about/working on strategies to integrate apps into the educational field.
What I mean by presentations: a collaborative presentation tool like this, no login required, etc…so that groups of people can work on and edit a ppt presentation. People include transitions, animations, images, objects, graphs, etc in their presentations. You can’t really do that with doingtext, which is a very promising tool btw, and that’s why I asked if there is some web-based app specifically for that.
I’m happy to hear that login won’t be required at all. If the tool gets better and better and it gets a good word-of-mouth, I hope you have a robust server to cope with all that!
oh and about the “no login required” – it will be true (as in creating discussions without a login) once we are out of closed beta (end of february).
hi elena,
argh. sorry for mixing up the names. i guess i only saw “victor” in the first comment.
i did come across some new kind of collaborative presentation tool recently but can’t find it anymore. it had one of those weird “web 2.0″ names…
once again if you have any suggestions where doingtext could be integrated … we are working on some first steps in this direction and would be happy for some more ideas.
Hi
This looks interesting can I have an invite please.
Russ
Hi Russell,
Your invite’s on its way…
Love this new tool. Your explanations on how to use it are great! If you have any invites left, I’d really like one. Thanks,
Janice
Hi Janice, invite on the way
I love the ideas for the logins here. A tool I love to use online for my students is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDfew0YcDTo Very inspirational and useful.
Enjoy!
Azahar (EducationDynamics)
Thanks for the video, I liked the beginning very much…but then when it changed the focus onto colleges, etc…I switched off. I guess it can very inspirational for those who are stuck and not sure whether they should go to college or not…but this sort of video and the sort of ideas expressed here generate a lot of expectations and then, once they are at the university/college most of the students realize it isn’t what expected, that great place to learn…because they realize that learning takes place outside those walls.
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