Zoho Sheet - Ghosting Flights

This year really has seen little difference, We are running our hardware locations from an Access database, the hardware moves are being planned on a spreadsheet, our web development is in a Project, and we have used thousands of little pieces of paper and legal pads… However, the platform has changed a bit.  Instead of using Microsoft Products for most of the main applications, this summer we are using the Zoho Suite of applications to work a bit more collaboratively in some areas.  My Internet Assistant and I are sharing a Zoho Projects 2.0 file to plan her development for both our webserver upgrade and the development of our new site leveraging the Joomla content management system.  In addition, most of the work I have done to prepare lists for our hardware moves and re-purposing have been done by leveraging Zoho DB and Reports to create quick pivot tables and then print the underlying data. (I created the filtered multi-level pivot table for our outbound inventory in about 5 minutes in Zoho… as opposed to working for almost an hour in Access to create the same thing…) One other tool from Zoho we are leveraging is Zoho Sheet for the tracking and shared updating of our “Ghosting” (re-imaging) schedule (image above).

Now even though I have used the Zoho Suite for about 3 years, I am still far from digging deep into each of the tools overall, and this years push for Zoho to fully integrate their applications has really increased the ease of use and simplicity for integration into typical business practices.  I would really like to leverage more of their suite into my typical daily practices, but it is hard when the rest of the environment you work in is resistant to change.  In addition, since as a group overall (typical also in many many businesses) we barely scratch the surface of all of the tools and uses for the Microsoft suite of programs as well, so where is the draw to other tools in the average company especially when we/they are paying a good sum of money for Microsoft licensing…

Overall, the biggest benefit that I/we have seen for using the Zoho Suite of tools is the automatic collaborative nature of a “cloud” application.  I love the fact that I can be anywhere with an internet connection and a web browser and I have access to my files.  Depending on platform, (iPhone or computer) I can update those files as well.  It is also exciting that I/we are always using the latest version of a document regardless of who made the latest change AND we are not limited to being on our work network (hoping another person in NOT in the file we want to update at that moment). However, the real excitement is collaborating live and real-time in the applications.  This experience was the genesis for this blog post.

Yesterday we began imaging our entire building to prepare the computers for the beginning of the new school year.  In the past we have tracked this either on paper, or in an Excel spreadsheet (typically in Excel).  While Excel is great for tracking the various stages of imaging (a simple data dump from our inventory database and we are set) it is very limiting for real-time updates or even having more than one person in that file at a time.  So for this year, I opted to NOT do the usual.  As opposed to completing the data dump, (although I could have easily uploaded the information into Zoho Sheet as well) I decided to create a Zoho Sheet and began setting up our “Ghosting Flights” – the rooms to be ghosted at one time. Then I shared this sheet simply by entering my Network Specialist and Network Technicians email addresses and we were off.  While I created the initial structure and entered the initial classroom list, my NS saw that I had some o the flights crossing vLans (crossing vLans does not work well with Symantec’s Ghost – it often quadruples the imaging time making a 40 minute image take 5 hours to complete if it does at all…) so he simply modified the flight room assignments to accommodate, and they were off ghosting with my NT always having the latest information as opposed to having saved a previous version and operating off old information.

I mentioned real-time updates… Here is the experience I had this morning.  For the past week most of my family has been ill and I am at crunch-time at work to get everything ready.  As such, I have been leaving at about 5:30am to get to work an arriving back home between 6-7pm… Needless to say it has been a it stressful in the household for my wife having to hold everything own (figuratively and literally) when I have not been there for support.  So, while Trish slept in this morning, I was giving my sons a bath.  However, two of my staff members were at school working to make a dent in the afore mentioned ghosting of the school classrooms.  Aside from feeling a bit guilty or both my work-life and home-life, I wanted to check in and see how things were going without interrupting the process.  Because we are leveraging Zoho sheet, all I needed to do was to open the shared Ghosting Flights sheet that we are using and viola! I have all the information I needed at my fingertips.  I could never have done this using Microsoft Excel (maybe next year with Office 2010 but that is a future post).  As a side benefit, Zoho Chat has been integrated into most of the Zoho Suite of apps, so I was able to have a quick chat with them for a few minutes to clarify some of the things I was seeing… All in all, PRETTY COOL!

Note: cross-posted at http://scottweidig.spaces.live.com

Ok, it is easier for the first day at least.  I’ll let you know when I hit day 30 or 60… I wil say that there is nothing better to help you succeed at something than forcing yourself to do it…

Today I ran exclusively on Zoho applications (except for my corporate email).  I know that this is not really new, but in a way I feel that it was.  In the past I always had Microsoft Office 2007 installed on my tablet pc.  It was an easy fall back, really easy.  Let me explain.  Three times today, I needed to open an existing document, spreadsheet, and presentation… in the past, I would unconsciously just double-click the file I needed and poof, the associated application would open.  However, without having Office installed, I needed to think twice, and react in a new way. 

First thing this morning, I needed to revise the quantity of a parts order.  I had the data in a Excel spreadsheet.  Oops… No Excel on this tablet anymore… for a second I actually had to pause to think of what I needed to do about this.  Then, I opened Zoho Sheet, and simply clicked the "import button" and browsed right to my file.  It kind of felt like opening Excel, and then clicking "file open." In about 15 seconds poof the file opened, and I was able to update the quantities, with all of the formulas importing correctly and recaltulating the totals instantly.  Pretty cool.  As a side benefit, I now had/have that particular spreadsheet available via my iPhone.  This came in handy later in the day when a collegue of mind needed information from that same sheet.  I was able to bring it up when we were away from our PC’s…

My second, opportunity to interact with Zoho in a completely "Office-like" situation was when I needed to fill out a point of contact document for a video conference call I have with Pearl Harbor this Friday.  I saved the attachment from email, and then "imported" it into Zoho Writer.  After providing a bit of information, I was ready to send the file back to my contacts at Pearl. This time, instead of going through the "normal" process of saving a document and then "attaching" it to an email, I simply clicked "Share" and "Email Out" in Zoho Writer.  I entered a few email addresses, and off the edited document went as the body of the email right from my zoho mail account.  Nice.

Finally, later in the day, I reviewed an old PowerPoint presentation for some information that I need for a presentation I will be doing for my Board of Education.  This time there was no uncomfortableness in what I needed to do.  I launched Zoho Show from the desktop links I created earlier in the day, and imported my presentation, in about a minute, I was moving through the information with ease… All in all it was a really easy day living in the cloud.

The air is nice up here, anyone want to join me?

Well it is a new day, and we have “Sprung Forward” (Day Light Savings Time, US) so I am continuing my adventures in the cloud… I almost feel like I am renewing a new year’s resolution.  Interesting feeling…

Im my press forward to continue my adventures, I recently needed to do a clean install of my OS as, even against Microsoft’s own recommendation, I upgraded my Tablet’s Vista Ultimate install to Windows 7.  While the Upgrade went very smoothly, I had a some software that just did not want to play well in the Win7 environment… Also, it just reinforced why I never recommend a upgrading an OS, ALWAYS do a clean install!  Interestingly, one of Microsoft’s own packages (Live One Care – AV-Firewall-Anti-Spam) in not compatible with Win7 and it let me know that all the time.

So last week, I migrated all of my data to my 16GB Corsair USB Drive, and performed a clean install of Windows 7.  Ok, well I actually did the install twice. The first time, I upgraded to the 32bit version and it only took about 15 minutes total (now that was pretty cool).  However, I have a 64bit Intel Core2Duo processor, and I wanted to try out a 64bit OS, so I went through the OS install again with the Windows 7 64bit installer this time.  It took about 25 minutes for the 64bit install (again not to shabby).

Now, up into the “Clouds.”  I am really working hard NOT to install Microsoft Office 2007 at this point.  As I know that this will force me to truely use an online office suite.  My choice (not any big guess for this choice for those of you who know me) for an online office suite is Zoho.com.  While there are a number of reasons or this choice, Number 174 is blogging right from Zoho Writer, and Zoho’s use of Google Gears for “offline” editing and document creation, and Number 190 Zoho’s support for the iPhone which gives me access to almost ALL of Zoho’s application suite right on my iPhone! That said, to simplify my life a bit, I am using Outlook 2007 because it is allowing me to leverage Apple’s Mobile Me application to join my corporate email / calendar to my iPhone. I tried hard to use Zoho’s business suite (with mail and calender), but I found that I need my phone to “ping” me when I have an upcoming appointment… if it doesn’t, I sometimes don’t get where I need to be :0( I have put the word out to Zoho that I would really appreciate it if they could develop a true iPhone application that would sync with the iPhone mail / calendar / contacts… for now, I check my Zoho Business account regularly, but not enought to keep me from missing meetings.

Tomorrow will be a real test for me I think.   am going to be converting my current inventory database into Zoho DB and Creator so that I can begin running reports against the data to start planning for my technology bid and summer moves and technology repurposing. With the clean install of Windows 7 and Zoho Business Suite, so far I can say, the air is fine up here “in the cloud” want to come up and join me?

Photo Attribution: People, Clouds, and Triumph by cuellar

Well if I am going to live in the cloud, I can’t really use my favorite publishing tool Windows Live Writer can I?  So, in keeping with my “cloud initiative” I am looking to potentially use Zoho Writer to directly post to this blog.  Additionally, this is a nice test for Zoho Writer’s capabilities. 

Well, the first issue I had was setting up my blog, I was missing the xml.rpc piece to the blog url… Didn’t know it needed to be there, but this was easily corrected by looking at the FAQ’s for writer… My second issue was trying to get the picture you see above and to the left into this post.  Although the image dialogue box says that you can enter a url for an online photo… the dialogue would NOT let me type or copy and paste the url… when clicking in the filename/url box it would open my My Pictures folder… for me more interestingly, when I put the url in my WIndows File dialogue (like I was going to upload a fiel from my hard drive, Vistas nicely found the file in my temp browser folder, and I was able to select it that way. Hopefully it will upload.  We’ll see in a minute.

While I have not b

een a huge fan of Google Notebook, I have used it and showcased it in a presentation on Digital Notebooks at the IETC 2008 Conference last November.  I know that many educators really liked using Google Notebook.  Now overall for existing users it appears that Google will maintain the Notebook service as it is:

we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook. – Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Google Notebook

The loss of the Notebook extension I think will be a bigger hit to users as it made it so easy to grab thoughts and ideas… Ironically, on January 12, 2009 Will Richardson blogged about his reading practices and archiving the snippets of web-based thought that challenge him:

I’m growing increasingly enamored withe Google Notebook as a way to capture the best snippets and ideas for a variety of purposes. More and more, I read with an ear for saving the most salient parts, which is really challenging me to think of my own organizational schemes in a good, but somewhat frustrating way. – Will Richardson, Weblogg-ed.com

I hope that everyone finds a new tool that meets their needs for gathering, organizing, and leveraging digital content.  I would like to provide a an alternative, that to those of you who know me well will not be surprised… Zoho Notebook… I have always felt that Zoho provided a much more robust tool for gathering a plethora of different types of information be it text, audio, video, embedded, graphical and much more.  Additionally, 6 days after Google’s announcement Raju Vegesna, Zoho Evangelist, posted that Zoho had altered the Zoho Notebook firefox plugin to enable an import from a users Google Notebooks into Zoho Notebook.  Detailed directions are included in his post, but for some reason, the link within my Zoho Notebook in Flock did not take me to the location I needed… So, here are the instructions if you are looking to try.  The add-on worked flawlessly for me within Flock:

To import with ease, you can use our add-on for Mozilla Firefox.
Install or upgrade to Zoho Notebook Helper 1.0b2
On restarting Firefox, please point your browser to chrome://zoho-notebook/content/g2z.html and follow the instructions given there.

OR

To import your notebooks from Google Notebook into Zoho Notebook, please upload Google Notebook as Atom(.xml).
You can export your Google Notebook as Atom in Google Notebook’s interface.
Step 1: Click Manage notebooks on the left hand side.
Step 2: Click export on which notebook you want to export.
Step 3: Click Atom, You will be prompted to save a file. Save that file to your disk.
Step 4: Now click Browse or Choose file button provided below, to select the saved file.
Step 5: Click Import.

I also have heard (but not confirmed) that Evernote is looking to develop a similar import tool.

On a final note, Google is stopping it’s print ads business as well… In no way is Google hurting, but this is the first time I have seen them pull back … many are speculating what else will be getting cut as well… We all know 2009 will be a difficult year for everyone, but together we can and will get through these hard times.  For the last two years I have been enamored with Zoho, and hope that you will give Zoho Notebook a try.

Alright here we go… since I used examples as opposed to a concrete presentation the six topics below begin to flesh out the information that we went through in the session.  Additionally, I will continue building out each topic as I have been lax in that area.  Links to the expanded information are below this post.

Now this by NO means is planned to be a complete list, an expansive list, or even dare I say it the “best of the best” but they are good solid resources that should help to guide folks in a direction. Remember there ARE and will always be alternatives.

However, I do recommend settling on a set of tools and growing with them until you really outgrow them. So, to avoid feeling overwhelmed, look to see where you feel you need a tool to help simplify what you do, enhance what you do, and or expand what you offer.

On to my choices.

[side note: while writing this post I came to the conclusion that I need to break out each of these resources into separate posts to provide more information as well as links to possible educational uses to add value to the WHY should you add these types of resources to your arsenal of learning and teaching tools.]

Additionally, I wanted to provide a category for each set of resources so if the one I mention doesn’t meet your needs you can do a quick search to find another. As an overview, I would recommend getting an online resource for: office applications, bookmarking, photo sharing, RSS newsreader, notebook / annotation, tagging, and social networking. If you look hard at this list, it becomes apparent that most (if not all) of these resources can be handled by offline Microsoft products (IE, Outlook, OneNote, Live Photo Gallery).

The main reason I recommend moving these resources online is for the flexibility it provides YOU the user. I’ll come right out and say it… I AM A HUGE FAN OF MICROSOFT, however, that said, I HATE being tethered to one machine (although you will rarely find me without my tablet). With resources floating in the ether you can access them from anywhere there is an internet connection. If you don’t think that this is important ask yourself a couple of questions: Have you ever really needed a link that you know you saved on your home or school computer and now you are somewhere else? Have you had your personal computer crash the day before a huge presentation / project was due? Have you wanted to connect with others about a topic but did not know where to begin? Well… yes you need to begin moving into the “cloud.”

Social Networking:

twitter – By far twitter has become the one tool above all else that all educators should become involved with. A brief description is that twitter is a microblog… your life in 140 characters or less in the moment that it is happening… but it is so much more. It has revolutionized and become a huge piece of my personal learning network. The amount of targeted and useful instructional information I get from my twitter network is staggering. So much so, I have created a folder in my favorites called “Twitter Links to Review” as I cannot get to everything in real-time… feel free to add me to your network my twitter handle is vanishingpoint

Online Office Suites:

Zoho.com is my choice for office productivity in “the cloud.” The folks at Zoho have created a HUGE suite of applications that well… all work! Writing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, wikis, project management, databases, an online NOTEBOOK and much more. The biggest reason that I really am taken with Zoho is both the integration of their tool set as well as their focus on collaboration. Additionally, they are continuously expanding their offerings. Did I mention that all of their apps are FREE!

RSS Aggregator (reader):

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a tremendous way to simplify your processes in searching and gathering information. In short, once a “feed” is setup, information comes to you as opposed to you hunting for it. My choice of RSS Reader is NewsGator. With NewsGator is pull in news stories from around the world as well as educational and instructional blogs. Additionally, most magazine type services (and all search engines) have RSS feeds embeded into their sites that you can tap into. This type is resource allows you to become a “grazer” of information as opposed to a hunter of information. One of my main criteria for an RSS aggregator was that it would function both online and via a mobile device. The majority of time I access NewsGator through my Motorola Q Global via NewsGator Go!. Additionally, NewsGator allows me to “Clip” a post or piece of information that I find valuable and save it permanently. This is huge as it keeps me from having to use an additional service like Furl for that purpose.

Bookmarking:

I have used Del.icio.us for about a year, and have been very happy ALWAYS having access to my bookmarks and important links. Additionally, with del.icio.us’ use of tagging, I don’t really have to remember the exact name for resources … just a “category” or idea that I have “tagged” the site link with, and poof it is there… even better, I can pull ALL the resources I have tagged with a certain word at one time… and I can share them, and receive links from others in my personal network. The idea of social bookmarking is not new (we have all shared bookmarks and links with friends in the paper world… del.icio.us brings speed and efficiency to this process. Lee Lefever has a great video that explains social bookmarking well.

Recently there has been a TON of twitter traffic about Diigo. While I have not used it at all, I am beginning to investigate it and its possible uses. Kristin Hokanson wrote an excellent blog post called Dig-ging… Diigo today about the power and value of Diigo which provides compelling reasons to switch and consolidate a number of resources to Diigo… Here is a link to my new Diigo profile.

Photo Sharing:

I absolutely LOVE Flickr! Flickr like others allows anyone to upload photo and share them with family, friends, and or the world. I use the camera in my Motorola Q Global daily, and mms my photos immediately to flickr (and a number of other folks) through my phone. This way my family around the world can see my kids and the things I am getting involved in well… daily! My flickr account is even linked to my blog… look to the left to see what pictures I took today

NoteBook:

If you have used Microsoft OneNote, or have wished that you could move ANY type of information into a digital notebook that you can annotate, enhance, or share, you really need to look at Zoho Notebook. Think of it as a digital three-ring binder that you can put ANY information, resource, tool (live or static) into. You can then collaborate with other on it, or share the entire notebook, a page, or even an object with anyone! You can even publish it for the world to see. Here are a couple of examples from notes that I took during a conference sessions at IL-TCE 2008. Example 1 Example 2 Example 3 (Example 3 shows quite a bit of the capabilities of Zoho Notebook).

This post has grown exceeding long and I an exceedingly tired… If you have thoughts or comments, I am welcome to all views!

Scott

Photos from Flickr: Dazed81, just Mike is fine and Lady Ying

Related Posts:

• In the Cloud Expanded – Part 1 Professional Social Networking
• In the Cloud Expanded – Part II RSS Aggragators
• Digital Notebooks for Research, Clarity, and Organization

We are approaching our winter round of NEWA’s MAP testing.  with that in mind, I needed to begin building a schedule for testing lab assignments.  I fired up Zoho Sheet, and then quickly decided NOT to re-invent the wheel.  I opened my network drive, got my fall round schedule and went to upload it into Sheet to begin making the necessary changes… The easy thing would have simply been to open the spreadsheet from my network and make changes… However, that would NOT be in keeping with my “Cloud-Time” goals…  So, I looked to import my file into Sheet… MMmmm nope… while Zoho can export to .xlsx (Office 2007 format, it cannot import the .xlsx (or .docx or .pptx)… well that caused me to have to launck Excel 2007 and then “save as” into Excel 97-2003 format. (Easily done, but a bit annoying, time consuming, and defeated the purpose of trying NOT to use Office 2007…  I guess I could not have been lazy and simply re-created the simple schedule, but where is the fun in that… If I am going to work at something, I might as well learn from it.

Ok, file converted, here we go … import… nope… original still on the network, and the import keeps crashing… OK… copy to desktop and import! Woohoo imported successfully! Import Completed, time to edit… well sort of… Hmm I have 4 cells merged in one area and want to do that in another… can’t figure that out… 10 minutes of looking and still no idea, (nope no easy help button either). Can’t figure it out… [scratch head] well maybe I can copy and paste the one that is already merged. Bingo done! [mental note: got to figure out how to merge cells].

Editing.  Overall editing the sheet was SIMPLE almost all functions and editing work very similarly to Excel.  With even a few added bonuses when you highlight and right click.  (ex. I was able to resize all row heights with a single click…  I could even add 40 rows with a click if I wanted too).

Schedule finished, now how to get it to all of the different folks who will have classes testing.  In the past I have either attached the sheet to an email, or copied and pasted it right into an email… However, with Zoho, I simply “published” the sheet (nothing private or sensitive here) and popped the link out to all of the users.  One click and they can view it… Additionally, as I update the sheet it will change for them dynamically pretty cool. 

The only frustration I did have publishing was Zoho refused to use the updated name for the publish after I renamed the sheet… additionally, because I have a business account at Zoho as well often when i went to publish the sheet it picked up the /corporate/ publish instead of the /public/ link format.  Unpublishing and re-publishing corrected each time, but there is little bug there Raju.  On the positive side, while I was publishing and unpublishing I did discover the “Merge Cells” button!  Woohoo… 

All in all, keeping with the education tradition, I would give the experience today a B+.  Which in my book is quite good.  I remember the first time I used Excel 2007, it took me 20 minutes to locate the “Find” function (little binoculars if you are wondering), and then I resorted to using the “help” in Office to pin it down.  Heehee…

See you tomorrow!

~Scott

Coming out of the IETC Conference in Springfield, IL. I have been doing some thinking about my personal practices and how I use the Microsoft Office suite.  I have to say that I LOVE Office 2007.  There are some truly amazing things that you can do so easily in 2007 some of which cannot even be done in other products.  However, that said, I also feel that there are a number of limitations in Office because it simply lives offline.  YOu need to discount what Microsoft says about "Office Live" it is NOT really live, or online in any other way than acting like a file storage area… According to my discussions with Microsoft, Office will be releasing true online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote in the next year or so… we’ll see how that goes. 

On to my premise and the reason behind this post. I gave two presentations at IETC that were really based on "the cloud."  Most if not all of the resources that I referred to in the presentations were completely web-based.  Additionally, almost all of the source material for the presentations came from the net… So, I got to thinking… I use Zoho for some limited docs, I use Zoho Notebook for all of my conference sessions and notebooks as well as for a number of other things, I use Zoho wiki for my personal and VP’s wiki. Slideshare puked on all 3 of my presentation uploads, but Zoho Show not only accepted them, but I used it to embed them into my session blog posts without an issue… (even though one was 4MB over their "recommended upload size of 10MB), I use Zoho Creator for 2 small applications, and just last week I began using Zoho’s 24×7 site monitoring service to keep tabs on my school’s website.

However, I use each of them when I have a need, not as part of my every day activities… This week I am going to attempt to change that pattern.  This week, I am going to exclusively use the Zoho suite of products for all of my Office activities, minus email (even though Zoho has a great email client) as I need my email / calendar integration to my Motorola Q to survive.

Ok, the question that usually come up at this point is "why Zoho and not Google?" well… while I have used Google’s "Docs and more" apps, they are not nearly as refined or as well integrated as Zoho’s.  Additionally, while Google has a ton of tools geared around their strength of search, Zoho’s tools are completely geared around Business apps and the Office suite.  They are tighter and more robust as well…

Please feel free to argue with me on that point.  I am always open to learning more about any tool that will assist student learning and increase efficiency.

I will update with challenges and successes in the coming days. I will tell you it was great to see that with very small changes to the slide master for each of my IETC presentations they were easily uploaded, converted, and embedded into this blog without issue. WTG Zoho!

Right now here is the partial agenda / topics I have for the session:

• Overview of the differences between XP and Vista
• How to choose a Vista Version
• New helpful features in Vista
• How to find and organize your data in Vista
• How to move your old files and data to your new Vista PC
• Demonstrating new entertainment and sharing applications

Session Notes and Information will be maintained in a Zoho Notebook.  You can click here for the notebook (still in development).  Additionally, I will be embedding the notebook on the presentations page of this blog and into the VP Wiki.

I am still going back and forth on building out my own information or leveraging most of Microsoft’s own website.  Also, I am a bit concerned about copyright violation even just screen clipping from my Vista installation…

Finally, I will be uStreaming the entire session at: VanishingPoint (Not sure if I will have chat capabilities through the Mount Prospect Public Library so I may be streaming via BYOB through my Motorola Q Global.)

~Scott

I left a long comment and it got me thinking about my use of Zoho’s myriad of applications and how they might be better used in conjunction with embedding, for classrooms projects and collaborations.  For those of you who do read my blog, you already know that I am a big fan of the folks at Zoho and all they have done "in the cloud." But, I am also a big fan of Microsoft and all of it’s products and the interoperability of their tools set.  I am a huge fan of Office 2007 and OneNote 2007 is about the the best resource any individual and group can have. However, Greg’s post stirred my creative thoughts, and I am currently warring with a paradigm shift my brain is trying to undergo.

At one point in his post Greg made the comment:

Today, I had a chance to try to embed a Gdoc (word file). No luck. Google doesn’t give you an embed code, only a link to a webpage. I wasn’t happy with this  as I want everything inside the security of Moodle. So, I tried Zoho.com, and they DO provide an embed code, not only for their writer, but also their spreadsheets (they may do this for other types,  I haven’t tried it out yet). My co-teacher was really excited about the spreadsheet because when you embed the spreadsheet in a Moodle web page, students can enter data right there online, and there is a link to download to excel right there.

Regarding Zoho… ALL of their apps have an embed feature. every darn one of them!  Anything that you can create in Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Creator, Projects, DB, Notebook, Planner, and Chat can be shared, collaborated upon, and embedded into other resources … That is an amazing set of interoperable tools that are all "in the cloud."  Additionally, last December (2007) Zoho leveraged  Google Gears giving Writer the ability to edit offline as well as online.  This allows you to take 15 documents offline, edit them, and when you are back online, they will sync back to Zoho’s servers. 

I  really like the ability to move into and out of all of the applications with ease, as well as the ability to bring some Zoho apps into other Zoho apps…

With Zoho Show you can even conduct remote presentations where your clients / viewers can "login" to the presentation anywhere in the world and you can conduct a presentation controlling the slides for everyone at the same time. Pretty cool.

Let’s look at a some educational opportunities:

With Greg looking at Moodle for security options I will use that as a springboard for the ideas below.

Think of this for a class activity. Have your class collaborate in groups in Zoho writer… then they can embed the doc in Moodle… Now what they are collaborating on is a review guide for each of your units… each person in each group takes turns updating each day and if they want they can be in the doc at the same time. Now at the end of the unit, all groups have a tailored review sheet. The best part is:

• With the shared doc you can see the additions/edits/changes by each with history…
• With the embed each time there are changes the entire group sees it immediately
• If you want you can set up the groups to restrict or allow access to the others “view” to compare.
• With the google gears link they don’t even have to be online to access/update. Next time they are online it will automatically update.

Note: you can do the same thing with a Zoho wiki when you show them RSS etc… (no Google gears yet but they do allow backups to local drive)

Now, do that with presentations as well… with the embed you can watch the presentation grow and then make the Moodle page active when your students are active presenting… no “projects” left at home / bad disk / etc

Now, considering a digital portfolio for your kids for the year? Step into the world of Zoho Notebook… You can embed all of their docs, presentations (Show), sheets, plus text / video / audio / ENTIRE LIVE WEBSITES / research for building each of those… EDIT AND UPDATE Writer, Sheet, Show RIGHT FROM WITHIN THE NOTEBOOK!

What to hear a really cool twist. Once everything is in a Zoho Notebook, you can “share" the notebook with read or read/write access (group editing / review)… and you can embed the entire darn notebook into Moodle! How about that for digital learning, archiving, portfolio management… and the best part update any of the originals and poof the Notebook and all else is up to date!

Here are a couple of examples of Zoho Notebook’s capabilities.

My Notes from IL-TCE 2008 Lucy Grey’s "Going Global" Presentation Notebook

Here is a Notebook I created: Think of the Possibilities

Can Google Docs do that? 

Zoho Rocks… oh and some of the Zoho apps have Skype and or chat capabilities built right in… You need any help or ideas/thoughts just drop me a line.

Scott

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