In the course of a school year, most teachers will have students produce written content that they think should be shared with other readers. Other times teachers create writing projects with the goal of having students share their work publicly. The web offers many ways to publish written work, the following are six of my favorite free options.
Google Docs and Zoho Writer are the probably the simplest tools for publishing written work to the web. In both cases you can create and share all of your works without leaving the program. Google Docs allows to publish your documents as a webpage. You can then email url or post the url on your blog or website. Zoho Writer provides an extra option which generates an embed code for your documents. Using the embed code will allow people to read your documents without having to leave your blog or website. By the way, if you’re not familiar with Zoho Writer check out the video included in this post.
Scribd and DocStoc are similar services that can best be described as YouTube for documents. You cannot create documents within either service rather you have to upload documents created with your preferred word processing program. Both services accept all of the common Microsoft formats, Open Office and Neo Office formats, and PDFs. Once you’ve uploaded your document it will be assigned a url and given an embed code. You can use the embed code to feature your documents on your blog or website. You can see how I’ve used DocStoc in the past by checking out this post.
If your students do any projects involving newsletter or magazine creation, you owe to them to check out Yudu and Issuu. Both services allow users to turn their static documents into page-turning online documents. To use the services simply upload your documents and select the visual effects that you want your documents to have. With out any special skills, your students’ work can take on a very polished, professional look that they will want to show-off. You can embed the finished products into your blog or website. To see an embeded Yudu publication visit this post. To see a stand-alone Yudu document, please click here.
