EtherPad: rife with possibility for the language classroom
Filed Under Tools
In early February, AppJet.com released a real-time collaborative text editing tool. What does that mean? It means that in less than a minute both you and I can be writing on the same page, seeing the same notes, and editing each others’ work.
How to use it:
1) Go to EtherPad.com and click on the orange button to create a new pad. EtherPad will assign a random “slug” to your URL, such as x3b6ds9s. Better yet, think of a URL that you would *like* to use and type it straight into your browser. I want to create an EtherPad for the World Language Lab, so I’ll type http://etherpad.com/wll. Immediately, a message pops up telling me that nobody has snagged this URL yet, so I can have it. Great! I click “Create pad”.
2) Now I’m inside the pad and I see a sidebar with some expandable sections on the right and a big white text area on the left. I click on “edit name/color” to write my first name. I want to invite another faculty member to the party, so I’ll click on the “invite more people” link and enter the email for, say, Mr. Farver.
3) Mr. Farver gets an email that looks like this:
He clicks on the link and now he’s working on the same pad I am!
4) Mr. Farver and I can type messages to each other in the chat window on the right while we work together on an agenda for next Tuesday’s meeting. At any point, we can save a version of our document, which will be saved just in case we need to go back to an earlier version.
So that’s it. It might look pretty simple, but technologically, this is quite an accomplishment. Just imagine that somewhere out there in the big wild internet, there’s a database that is keeping track of each and every character I type, each carriage return, each and every backspace, copy, or paste, etc. etc. EtherPad supports an infinite number of undo actions. And it’s doing it for multiple users at once!
Ms. Jackson and I are creating a list of possible uses for EtherPad. I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish with this tool to make language learning more fun and lasting.
