Collaborative Writing with Writeboard & JotSpot

Writeboard.com and JotSpot (www.Jot.com) are wiki tools that allows students to collaborate on a shared documents that are stored online. Both keep track everytime the document is edited and saved, which (1) ensures that nothing is ever lost, and (2) enables viewing and grading of each student's contribution.

With Writeboard, teachers can simply create a topic and then share the URL and password to the specific site with students. Students can enter and edit text. Both students and teachers can view each change that was made and who it was who made by. The only problem is that there is no control over the name that someone enters when they edit the text -- and they can even leave the name blank. I used this with a small group of six graduate students in the Spring 2006 semester. Unfortunately, paragraphs that students wrote were deleted without a clear explanation (which I had required). The first time the student who did it said he was unaware that he had done that -- which I believe. The second time it happened, the ID was blank. So I have no definitive idea who did it, though there are clues.

JotSpot is a much more robust (and complicated) online editor with tracking features. I just discovered this one. It provides a full MS Word-like editor, and gives each user a different login ID. It also allows setting user access levels (read only, edit, and more) for specific users for specific parts of a document -- which Schtuff.com also does, though Schtuff does not track changes. JotSpot is clearly the best collaborative writing tool for a class environment that I have seen so far. It does, however, take a bit of experimenting to figure out how to best set it up for your situation. The only shortcoming is cost. It is free for 5 users (which will not work with my current 6 students). For up to 10 users it costs $9.95/month.

With only two months left in the semester, I am going to switch to JotSpot. If there are any unanticipated consequences of doing that, I will be posing that information on this blog.

NEW!!! - WebCollaborator.com - I just learned of this one. Sounds a lot like JotSpot, but is completely free for unlimited online use. I have not used it...yet.