Collaborative Writing Tools

Looking for Collaborative Writing Tools to use with in your classroom then you have come to the right place.

from Educators' eZine


According to Wikipedia, the term collaborative writing refers to work created by a group collaboratively rather than by one person individually. Collaborative writing is useful for projects, for peer-editing, and for many other writing tasks limited only by teacher/student imagination. Web-based collaborative writing tools may be used by teachers to provide feedback on student assignments, to make suggestions and comments on a projects and highlighting required changes to a member of the project.


In general, collaborative writing tools provide flexibility and usefulness. Collaborative writing tools can vary, ranging from the simplicity of a wiki to more advanced systems. Many web-based writing tools have features that mimic the typical formatting and editing facilities of a standard word processor. Some may offer live chat, live markup and annotation, co-editing, and version tracking.


Finally, collaborative writing and Web 2.0 work together seamlessly. Collaborating students need not be in the same room, or even the same school/city/state/country. And their work, usually password-protected, may be accessed from any Internet-enabled computer. So a student, or team of students, may begin work on a school computer and continue working after the school day on any other Web-enabled computer, whether that computer is physically at a youth center, at a library, or in the student's home. These are the basic advantages of Web 2.0 tools; so now let's look at four of them.

Collaborative Writing Tools: Comparison Summary

	Google Docs	Zoho Writer	WriteBoard	ThinkFree
File Types Support	Text	Text, Images	Text	Text, Images
Software/Web-Based	Web-Based	Web-Based	Web-Based	Web-Based (Java)
Public/Private	Public/Private	Public/Private	Private	Public/Private
Text Chat	Unknown	Unknown	No	Unknown
Revisions	Unknown	Unknown	No	Yes
RSS	Yes	Yes	No	Unknown
Email Updates	Yes	Yes	No	Unknown
Real Time	No	No	No	No
Comments	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Spell Check	No	Yes	No	Yes
Export/File Formats	DOC and XLS	DOC,PDF, HTML and RTF	TXT	DOC, DOCX,PDF, HTML XML and TXT
Price	Free	Free	Free	Free