Sharing Information
Are there occasions when your community group would like to share documents or gather ideas from the group? It is possible to send documents by email, of course, and this is fine when a response is not required. But when you have a document that you'd like to collect responses to, or you want ideas back from the group then it is far quicker to use one of the online tools that is designed specifically for this purpose.
Etherpad is one such tool. It is a sort of wiki that allows up to sixteen people to use it at the same time. They can contribute to an existing document or create a new one. It could have so many uses for a community group:
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The resource is a How to Guide to using Etherpad. Select the link below to access it. The guide is created in MS Word and will open in a separate window. It can be downloaded and saved to your own computer or printed out.
Etherpad allows individual uses to change the text size and colour. You can return to previously saved versions. It is also possible to export the Etherpad document to different formats such as HTML, PDF or Word.
The How to guide was produced in MS Word. The font size and background colour of the document can be altered and the text read out using a screen reader.
There are other tools for online sharing of documents these include Adobe Buzzword and Googledocs.
To try out the use of shared documents and see how it could benefit your group, why not create the agenda for your next meeting using Etherpad?
