Etherpad is a very interesting new collaborative writing tool. It allows you to instantly create a shared writing space which you can edit in real time alongside up to 8 other people.

To get started – go to the Etherpad website and click on the Create New Pad button. It will generate you a writing pad with a unique URL. All you need to do then is pass that URL to others. You could do this via email – or via Twitter or place the link on a blog or wiki. The etherpad page will email people for you if you give it their email addresses.

As each person uses the pad – their contributions are colour coded. You can change the username that is displayed and the colour from the side panel. You can also save revisions whenever you like so if a pad gets ruined you can go back to a prior save.

I tried it out for the first time this week on my web 2.0 courses. I wanted to collate all the URL’s for the new blogs that each of the course delegates had created. I created an Etherpad and put the URL onto a page on the Wiki I had set up for the course.

Each delegate was asked to go to the Etherpad and enter their new blog URL. We could then all see the edits appear on the screen. The one issue we hit was that I did not realise that we were limited to 8 users at any one time. So we did it table by table and once one batch had logged out the next batch of people could log in.

For the second course I changed the approach slightly and nominated a scribe to each table who collated the addresses and added them to the Etherpad.

Both approaches worked well. We had a shared space that allowed me to easily collect in information from a large group of people. I could then copy and paste the information from the etherpad into a blog post or into a Word Document.

There are other tools that allow collaborative writing – such as Google Docs, but what impressed me with this one was the speed in which I could get a group of people working on a document collaboratively. It literally took 60 seconds.

There is a risk of misuse – and of people adding text that shouldnt be there or deleting everything, but as long as you save the draft occasionally you can always revert to a past version.

You could use this with a class to work on a group story. To improve a piece of writing as a class. You could use it to collate research that they had done. You could even have a pad open for them to ask questions during a lesson (or after a lesson) which you could then answer. The Ideas to Inspire website has some other ways to use Etherpad.

It probably has just as many uses out of the classroom for admin and collaborative working with your colleagues, even if they are on the other side of the world. Try it out and see what you can come up with.

Here’s a blank Etherpad I have just created. If you want to add your own text here then go ahead. If you can think of any ways to use a tool like this, add them to the pad!

Related posts:

1. Primary pad – a new Etherpad
2. Etherpad to go Open Source?
3. Scribblar – a shared whiteboard space
4. Wordle
5. The Great Wordle Crisis

Filed under: Activity Ideas, Literacy Resources, Resources, Useful Links

Tagged with:, collaborative, etherpad, shared, tool, Web 2.0 Essentials, writing