Wikis

I think that the concept of wikis can be very helpful and a good way to get information and share information. I think that schools blocking wikipedia as a source of information is both good and bad. Because wikipedia is a wiki and anybody can add information the information that can be found on these sites may not always be entirely factual. I think that instead of blocking students access to information found on wikis teachers should be teaching students better information gathering techniques and to check their sources and make sure that the information that they are gathering is reliable and verifiable from various sources. 

Google Docs and Zoho

I found Google Docs to be very useful. The fact that it is free and can be used on all platforms is a huge added bonus. One of the features that I liked the most was that you could use it to work on a document with multiple people all at the same time. One thing that I thought could be added to it to make it more useful would be a chat function so that people working collaboratively on a document could talk to each other about the document without having to type into the actual document. Also because it is a web based tool you have to have internet access to use it which could be a drawback as there is not internet access everywhere. 

Compared to the Zoho suite of tools the Google suite of tools is much more basic in features. This makes the Google set easier to use but gives the user less options as far as what kinds of manipulations you can do with the documents, spread sheets, or graphs that you are working on. The added features on the Zoho tools made them much slower to load on my computer and in fact froze up my browser completely twice before I gave up for the evening and decided to try again the next day. This could potentially be a large repellant to people who may want to try to use these tools simply because they cannot get them to load on their computers because the programs are too complicated and bogged down with features. 

Overall I think that I would be more inclined to use the Google tools because of the fact that they are simpler and they load much more reliably than the Zoho tools.