I just saw Writely on Wes Fryer’s site. Writely is a web-based word processor that then allows you to share you documents with others. This is the kind of collaborative tool that we desperately needed back in the days of the cyber-mentoring project. It’s this kind of project that taps the power of what Will Richardson calls "the read/write web."

Now, I’m enough of a "Do It Yourself" geek that I wish this was a software package that I could install on a server at school (when we have a server, that is) so that the kids, teachers and mentors could work right on the school site. And any time I see a free beta, I worry that I’ll get enough teachers hooked on it just long enough until the service becomes a pay site.

All that being said, the mind boggles at what this software could allow us to do.
Cyber-mentoring where the mentors could actually comment right on the student papers.
Collaborative projects with other schools.
Collaborative projects within school where the meetings wouldn’t necessarily all have to be face to face.
So much more potential for teacher-student interaction.

Web-sites let us publish to a wider world. Blogging made that easier — and let folks write back to us. Web-based software like this let’s us create together easily, no matter what the spaces are between us.

(And Brian — if you are out there, let me know what the name of the other piece of software that does this is. Our conversation was so far-reaching that I forgot its name.)