Thing #19

I explored thinkfree. http://www.thinkfree.com/main.jsp It is similar to Google Docs in that documents are stored online. Multiple people can view and contribute to the document. I like this tool because you can control how much each member is allowed to modify the document. This would be useful in an education setting because the teacher could "lock" some parts of the document that she wanted to be static and leave the rest of the document "unlocked" for the students to manipulate. Another feature that I really like is that there is a setting to receive an email update any time the document has been modified. So, you don't have to keep checking back to see if anything has changed. (I could not find a feature like this in Google Docs.) This tool is similar to a wiki, but it is free and, as far as I could tell, there is no advertising on the documents. There are so many uses for documents that are stored online. They are convenient because they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. They could be used among staff for planning lessons or used among students when working on collaborative projects.