Online Applications Reviews

Both of the following free online applications I would recommend to teachers to use personally and with students. If there is any understanding of the Microsoft equivalent programs, such as Office tools and Paint, they are easy to use and navigate through. Each application also offers something new that would appeal to any user and allow for more creativity that might be missing from the common Microsoft applications used today. I hope you enjoy my reviews and if you have any questions or anything to add to aid me in my understanding of these applications, please share. It would be much appreciated!

Office Suites: Zoho
First of all, you have to either register with Zoho or have a Google account to login to Zoho’s applications. Might seem silly, but the layout on Zoho’s site is much like that of Google’s (is it from the same creators, I don’t know) and I kept trying to input my Google login without realizing I had to choose the link to sign in with my Google account. If you were to use this application with students (or teaching the use of this to colleagues), I can see new users getting confused, frustrated, and distracted by this right away – definitely something to avoid.

Zoho has lots of applications that are easy to use and attractive in appearance. If you have any experience with Microsoft Office applications, you’ll do just fine – as most of us, especially our students, do. In the Zoho Docs section, you can easily organize and retrieve your different types of documents (Show – like PowerPoint, Sheet – like Excel, etc.) that have been created and saved as well as tag them so that they are easy to organize, use, and share. I played around a lot with the Zoho Show application and found it exceptionally easy to use with some refreshingly new ways to create a presentation. Show had some great backgrounds and shapes/animation options that were different from the boring, common ones always using in Microsoft’s PowerPoint. This aspect, especially, might appeal to our students as they seem to have been using PowerPoint and creating presentations since they were born.

What I really like about Zoho is the ability to collaborate with people near and far on just about anything you create. You have the option to host remote presentations, chat live with people, and, in general, be a more active participant in a group to create something new. They even have a wiki option, which was exciting since I actually know and can use and/or teach these applications to/with my students.

A few things that I didn’t like or found unnecessary is the fact that there is yet another email account option. Who needs more email? However annoying it is to have a million email accounts, if students used this account solely for project purposes and communication, it would serve its function well. Also, like many online applications, it was very annoying when, every time I picked a new application to use, what seemed like hundreds (maybe really just one or two) of windows popped up with the new application to be used. It was confusing as to what tabs I needed to keep open and which ones were unnecessary – making it a little difficult to navigate around to each individual application and/or use or compare more than one application at a time.

Image Editing: SUMO Paint
First of all, I would just like to say that I am impressed about the many varieties of “painting” one can do with SUMO Paint. As it is very similar to Microsoft’s Paint, SUMO seems to have a lot more feature options as well as the capabilities to share and learn from fellow users, which makes it that much more appealing.

SUMO Paint has all the normal options you might find in Paint, however some of them lack the ability to choose within the option. For example, I did not like how, when selecting the ink or eraser tools, you could not choose to make them bigger or smaller, at least to my knowledge. This makes it tedious when trying to erase or draw something in a large space because you have something that amounts to a “fine-tip maker” to do a larger job. Other options that are similar to Paint are tools such as the shape maker and “paint bucket” tools. All were easy to use and any student or colleague could be taught to use these tools to edit a picture easily.

Some of the features that seem to be unique to SUMO (and probably other more sophisticated image editing applications than the Paint I am used to) are the cool tools like the smudge tool, symmetry tool, and the free transform/rotate tools. The smudge tool does exactly what is sounds like, smudges areas of your mixtures to erase or “smudge” some of the sharp lines/images within the image you are working with. The symmetry tool is something you could use with students to teach symmetry, let alone enhance a drawing, picture, or photo. It allows the users to draw an image that is automatically reflected and repeated symmetrically. Kids could have fun playing with this tool as well as learning something. The free transform/rotate tool allows the user to take a section of the image that is being worked with and move or rotate the image to another location or within the same area. Point being here, is that there are some fun features that students could use to enhance any type of image and/or could be used to enhance some topics of a lesson already being studied.

As mentioned, I love the fact that these photos can be shared with others and saved within the internet application, so that students would be able to access their work in any location. For schools like mine, where we have several laptop carts and computer labs that are constantly being used, it is helpful to have access to documents and student work no matter the location. It was also nice that you (or students) could use this application as guest user, without signing in or opening an account. However, I did not really investigate the limitedness of the “guest user” option, as I am sure it has some.