I've been playing with an online word processor called Writely. So far I have to say I like it. It is by no means the most powerful word processor and that is one of the things I like about it. I use it as a fairly clean text editor that I can access from anywhere. There is no software to install, it runs right in your browser.

I use many computers on a daily basis. Heck even my MacBook is really two computers (OSX and WinXP). Writely allows me to easily share my most important documents among all my computers. This is good as I've been keeping my lessons plans on Writely this year and my MacBook seems to have died (note, I tried my MacBook again before I posted this and it has recovered). I freaked out at first, until I realized I'm still under warranty and all my most recent work has been on Writely and so is safe.

So far I have not really used one of Writely's most touted features, namely collaboration. You can set Writely up so that other people have access to your documents making collaboration much easier. This could make group projects much easier. I'm working on a lab manual (more on this in the future) with a retired teacher (my Physics mentor) who now lives in Colorado. I've uploaded the documents we've created so far and given him access to them, but so far he hasn't modified them, so I don't know how well the collaboration bit works yet.

I'm going to test out one of the other features as soon as I'm done typing. When I was making my last entry into my lesson plans I noticed a Blog tab at the top of the Writely window. Apparently I can blog directly from Writely. Being a Google product, Writely will apparently post to Blogger directly, but can also post to a number of other sites as well.

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