Ahhh the unlucky Thing 13. Turns out for me the only unlucky thing was the fact that I spent who knows how much money on Microsoft Office products throughout the years!
Thing 13 asked me to look around at Zoho and Google Docs. I started with Zoho. After creating an acocunt, I found that I was able to create the equivilent of a word document, excel spreadsheet and power point presentation, all for FREE! YEP, FREE! Everything was very intuitive and if you have any knowledge of the Microsoft products, navigating through Zoho is a walk in the park.
After playing around on Zoho for a bit, I decided to check out Google Docs. Before starting, Google Docs had me download Google Drive. Initially I thought I messed up and kept my fingers crossed that I didn't accidently download some virus, but it turns out Google Docs is a FANTASTIC little storage device that I will be using in the future! Google Docs is similar to Zoho in the respect that it offers options to create a document, spreedsheet, presentation (powerpoint) along with a drawing and form.
Although Google Docs and Zoho are fundamentally the same, I did prefer working with Google Docs, mostly because it seemed more visually pleasing. As a bonus, anything you create is automatically saved to your Google Drive! Google Docs comes with really comprehensive and easy to understand directions for all you nontechnical folks like me! The directions are very easy to understand and clearly outline a lot of the features that are provided. One of the great functions that I would like to try out in the future is the online collaboration. When working with Google Docs, you have the option to share the document with recipients that you select, who are then able to make their own changes and additions to the documents. This is a fantastic feature that could promote collaboration that I've never used with Microsoft. This could be such a great way to promote group work in the classroom outside of the school day. Or allow students to work on a project with a sister classroom in a neighboring state or around the world.
Overall, I'm really pleased with the options that Goolge Docs and Zoho provide. And come on, someone has to be excited as I am with the "free" aspect of both of these options!
Here's a little quiz that I created using Google Forms.
