Although I knew about Google Docs, I didn't realize there were other online office suites out there, or the level of functionality that they had. After tinkering with a few, I decided to look mostly at ThinkFree. I found both some positive and negatives about it, but I think all around it is something I would consider using should the opportunity present itself.
I was a bit skeptical about using online office suites to start, mostly due to the fact that there is less security of the document when it exists "in the cloud" rather than on your own computer or the school's server. This is not important for most things, sensitive student information could possibly be compromised. You can have all the secure connections and private settings you want, but saving a document to a server somewhere out in internet land automatically means that someone else could get to it if they wanted to. Thus, the types of documents created and saved on this should be selective.
My second impression was also pretty poor, as the Java application took an extremely long time to load the first time I opened the document writer. I took the time I was waiting to browse some other areas of the site, and it did say that the first time you run the program it might be slow, but should speed up after that. This was pretty much the case. Also, it took me 3 tries each to get the spreadsheet and slide show editors to open properly, but they did eventually work just fine. To be fair, I did this on my outdated laptop (probably 7 years old, and not very powerful), but this is probably closer to the equipment many schools are using than something more modern, so the I believe the point still holds.
The main thing I love about ThinkFree is that their editors look and function almost exactly like Microsoft Office 2003. This can help get over many colleagues reluctance to change, as they will already be familiar and comfortable with the layout and features. This can also help with getting students to use it, taking away one more thing that they could find to complain about it, as they most likely will have seen or used at least Microsoft Word, and quite possibly the 2003 version or the version prior (XP?), both of which are pretty much the same.
I also thought it was great how you could, by simply putting in email addresses, allow for others to view the file or to collaborate on it. This could work similarly to wikis in allowing students to collaborate on a project from their own homes. Alternatively to share the document, it can be published, which gives it a unique URL that can be linked to anyone who needs to see it (instead of attaching to an email, perhaps you give the URL). This would make it easy to share documents with students, or for students to work on a document at home or at school, and be able to pick up where they left off without having to remember to save it to a flash drive or email it to themselves (and then try to get around the school's network protections to download it). By giving the teacher permission to view the document, they wouldn't even have to print it off to turn it in, preventing the possibility of losing the assignment and allowing students without printers or with printer or ink or paper issues to circumvent those problems.
Overall, I think that ThinkFree is a great alternative to the cost of licensing an office suite for a school district, and a great tool to give some flexibility to both teachers and students in the way that they share documents, although care must be given for more sensitive information, which I believe should still be kept local (OpenOffice, anyone?)
No comments:
Post a Comment