Title: Plain Text 2
Platform: iOS
Cost: Free
When my school adopted iPads for AP and pre-AP students, one roadblock some students encountered involved working away from wireless networks. I showed some how to set up individual Google docs for offline access, but sometimes students wanted to begin typing an assignment and hadn’t created or adjusted a doc so they could access it at home. Plain Text 2 provides an excellent word processing platform for those instances, and it’s clean interface has made it a go-to for writing many documents.
If you’re thinking Notepad, the text isn’t THAT plain. Fonts include Helvetica, Courier, and Times New Roman, and you can adjust the font between 10 and 24 points…the only down-side is that whatever you specify is set for the document, so you can’t alternate fonts or sizes. You can also double-space, much to the delight of my students working on English papers, and there is a running word count and Flesch-Kincade Grade Level and Readability Scores (under the “info” option). An extended keyboard provides convenient access to the most commonly used symbols without toggling.
You can create folders for organization and sort documents by date and name, both ascending and descending, and specify the way folders and documents appear as well. Best of all, you can set it up to sync with Dropbox and iCloud…so our students can write at home, sync without any action on their part once they’re back on campus, and then access the online file from any connected device for further manipulation or printing.
You can pay an additonal $4.99 to remove ads, but they don’t seem a huge distraction. Librarians might want to share the Privacy option which disables analytics, too.
This app has been a lifesaver for many students on our campus.
The other day I was happily typing away, making great progress on a side-story that I had been working on intermittently for months. In the midst of typing, the entire document suddenly turned into asterisks. Every single word magically poofed into an asterisk before my eyes! My story was completely destroyed within a millisecond.
I tried everything I could possibly think of to bring it back, but the document had already been auto-saved and my attempts were useless. Unfortunately, I had not saved this particular story on my trusty flash drive (which I normally do, but since it was a side-story, I didn't bother) and was not connected to my
Apple Time Capsule, so all of my hard work is literally gone forever.
My world is crushed. :( I'd gotten way more attached to this side story than expected.
The program I was using is the 2011 Microsoft Word, which I chose to use because it is practical and efficient for my business as an author. Upon doing research, I found that the mysterious "asterisk attack" was a bug within the MS Word application. Supposedly,
the bug has been fixed and can now be prevented with a simple software update. I am skeptical.
The good news is that I have found an awesome program called,
Scrivener - a word processing program made specifically for writers by Apple. I may just have to give all of my stories a new home. :)
I am sharing this with you as a reminder to always back up and save your work in multiple formats, regardless of how big, small or seemingly unimportant. Technology is wonderful, but it can seriously backfire on you.
Lesson of the day: Never forget to back up your work!!!
Here are 6 ways to protect your precious documents:
1. Frequently save to a flash drive
2. Print hard copies
3. Email document to self or someone trustworthy
4. Back up on an external hard drive, Time Capsule, etc.
5. Create multiple saved versions on your computer
6. Regularly update software
Have you ever had technology backfire on you? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic.
good reminder.....thank you so much....
I also e-mail each of my chapters to myself.
Yay! Turn your lemons into lemonade! :)