Using EtherPad

Whew! Looks like it’s been quite some time since I’ve posted, huh? It’s really not that easy attempting to maintain a blog for professional learning when you’ve got work to do as well. Anyway, on to the topic at hand – I’m a little slow to join the party, but recently I’ve become a big fan of EtherPad.

I was initially trying to get my students to work on a group project (about 5 students per group) using Google Docs in the computer lab – it seemed like a great idea at the time, since it allowed all group members to collaboratively work on the document and even to continue doing so from home. Much as I’m a fan of Google, however, it works relatively sluggishly on the school computers. Some of my students switched to EtherPad services such as TitanPad and iEtherPad on their own, which just highlighted to me how students are often more knowledgeable than teachers when it comes to technology.

(Funnily enough, it’s actually been bought out by Google and made open source – which is why it’s now available on so many different sites – but that’s another story altogether.)

Essentially, EtherPad’s really similar to Google Docs in that it allows the collaborative editing of text with a chat option in the right column – my students tend to play with the chat quite a bit, but I don’t see that as a problem as long as they accomplish the assigned task(s) in the process. It doesn’t handle images and formatting all that well, but I think it’s good enough to finish up the text collaboratively before individually working on the formatting and design of the document on their own clients (e.g. Microsoft Word).

As I see it, the main advantages of EtherPad over Google Docs would be that it’s…

1. more responsive (definitely a big plus)
2. keeps a log of the chat (not always a good thing, but useful if you want to monitor their progress, or if they’ve had useful discussions via chat)
3. has the option of automatically highlighting changed text, which helps to show how each student has contributed

In addition to student work, I’ve found that it’s a helpful tool before meetings. What my IT committee sometimes does is to distribute the agenda via EtherPad (we use TypeWith.me, but for some reason that often crashes my Google Chrome) and the committee members can do some online (and asynchronous) discussion before actually meeting up, theoretically cutting down meeting times. Of course, this only works if most members put in the time/effort to read and discuss the issues, so mileage may vary.

Still, a pretty useful both inside and outside the classroom!

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