We’ve been exploring different ways which would allow us to share documents with our students in a way in which we can avoid busy e-mail exchange and enable co-editing via iPads. Here are some of our initial findings:

 

1. Google Docs is a great tool for sharing documents that can be co-edited. However, sharing via iPads requires sending e-mails and there doesn’t seem to be an option to create ‘folders’ via iPads. Our students will have iPads only. Gdocs can be used to create iBooks on Creative Book Builder and share via sending Gdocs link which would allow the students to open the book in iBooks (magically appearing on the shelf!). It is also possible to have the students visit the shared Dropbox folder to download the iBook. However, these books would be read only.

2. Dropbox,as mentioned above, allows us to create shared folders. However, uploading any documents rather than video and photos seem to be impossible on iPads. Why can one not drag and drop a Pages or Keynote file to Dropbox? We’ve tried creating files on Pages and Keynote. The options for sharing them were WebDav, iDisk and e-mailing. Unfortunately, there is no built-in option to share them via Dropbox.

3. WebDav: we don’t know a lot about this option yet. Pages and Keynote have a built in function to share docs on WevDav. However, these seem to be read only files only. No co-editing, again..

4. Evernote: What a fantastic tool! We’ve both been using Evernote to organize our personal and work e-mails and notes.. And yes, we love it! Using Evernote with the students is something we are excited to try for the first time in September (Watch this space!). As far as we know, our students will have the free version of Evernote installed on their iPads and co-editing is not allowed in this version.

Please do make suggestions and share comments on this. We really need some tips and suggestions at this point!

Decisions, decisions.. So many of them to make, yet so little time and information.. We are starting our summer holiday this Friday and will be back at work late August. The new semester stars early September! Quite a challenge but we are up for it! 🙂