I know from reading around the ITC510 Blogosphere that making best use of EtherPad proved difficult for other people doing this course. This part of the course was difficult for me also - mostly because I was offline for a week or so and badly overwhelmed with work duties at that point in time. In itself this raises a point about online communities: the need to be constantly online. Both my wife (an avid Facebooker) and I were offline for a couple of weeks. I spent a surprising amount of that time fielding questions about my wife not being on Facebook (Is everything all right? Is she OK? What's happened to XXXX?) Well, she lives. She just didn't have time to be online. So I apologise to my fellow Blue Podder's.
For the sake of the exercise I belatedly set up a public etherpad and unblocked it (a tale itself) from my school's blocked list ("Why don't you use Moodle? Moodle is what we use!") and had a go with the kids. Neat. Sort of. It shows me how this sort of tool could be used to collaborate on a document as a group in real time. But as an educator working with kids it was more of fun diversion than a great accomplishment.
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