Welcome to my Tool Shed for EDET 603 - Fall semester 2010! I'll have to confess, this 'project' is something I have running in the background all the time. As director of instructional technology at my institution I am always on the lookout for new (and free) tools I can test and recommend to colleagues. I keep a journal (paper and pencil!) on my desk ALL THE TIME to jot down recommendations from my broader network of colleagues I follow via Twitter and RSS subscriptions. I know the paper approach is old school/analog but it works for me. I can add notes about who shared the info and what they had to say about the tool. Sometimes that works very well. Sometimes it comes back to bite. I keep one book per year. The paper works because some of the tools that are wonderful can be rather transient and ethereal. I don't have to purge things out of an electronic file later. For example, I showed folks Etherpad - a wonderful live editing program that was free/opensource a couple of years ago. Some immediately saw the potential for live editing in a classroom where students were working on a document together. Then Etherpad was bought by Google. Google doc has live editing capability now thanks to Etherpad. And another example is my recommendation of Ning as a host site for groups to collaborate and have access to free tools to support their work. Well, Ning decided earlier this year (as I sure many of you know) to revoke free access and no long provide free sites. So, adoption and use of any of these tools has to come with the 'use/adopt/embrace at your own risk' disclaimer. All that said, recognizing that an important characteristic of web 2.0 is it's continual state of beta/emergence helps prevent establishing too strong a dependence on any new cool tool. No worries, there will be a newer cooler tool along in just a bit to take it's place! :-) The tools I am sharing are 'brand new' recommendations since the semester began in August.
A. Research Tools
SweetSearch
Sweet Search Authors: SweetSearch is a part of Dulcinea Media - a private group who refer to themselves as 'the curator of the internet' with the self-described intent of helping students conduct effective internet research. The group is located in New York and is made up of corporate executives, one librarian, and others. While they claim to have vetted their search returns through 'educators and librarians', details of that process are not provided.
SweetSearch describes its search tool as : "a Search Engine for Students, searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been approved by our staff. SweetSearch allows students to choose the most relevant result from a list of credible results, without the distraction of unreliable sites." According to information provided on the site, search results provided at Sweet Search and Sweet Search4Me have been carefully vetted by educators and/or librarians so that students who use the tool are assured of valid and reliable results.
To test the site a bit, I searched U. S. Consitution ( in honor of upcoming Constitution Day). The first search returns are to guides provided by another Dulcinea Media site - findingDulcinea. These guides may be of interest to teachers planning lessons on the search topic - in this case the U. S. Constitution. The remaining search results are in fact to what most would consider 'reputable' sites, many of which are direct links to .gov resources. I can see that the assurance of such returns might be very helpful to teachers in some circumstances.
While this tool looks quite promising, I am hesitant to recommend it to colleagues since so little information is provided about its authors, vetting process, and real intents and purposes. I include it here mainly because it came recommended by other ed. tech colleagues whom I trust.
fotopedia
Fotopedia Authors: fotopedia describes itself as a 'community', therefore finding one particular author to cite was a bit of a challenge.
fotopedia claims to be the 'first collaborative photo encyclopedia.' Okay. Finding an explanation of exactly what is meant or intended by that is difficult. The site's mission statementis quite brief. That said, the site does clearly intend to apprehend affordances of web 2.0 in that the collection of 'articles' (with accompanying illustrative photography) is built by community members. This is a 'community owned' repository, in-development and ever-expanding on the basis of the interests and contribution/sharing of community members. Opportunities to add to or share content via things like Twitter, Facebook, delicious, etc are provided as well as capability for embedding slide shows. The fotopedia guidelines for posting explain how flickr accounts and fotopedia postings interact with each other, and how Creative Commons licenses apply.
To test the site, I searched a suggested topic from the hope page: Galapagos Islands. The returns included amazingly beautiful images along with the stub of a text 'article' about the Islands drawn from Wikipedia....this part clearly 'under construction'. Links to related topics are available as well as an interactive map. The site claims to have 39571 articles in place with 567,350 images.
I can see how some of these beautiful images could be very helpful when teaching certain content. But I would say that at this moment, the site is just in its infancy. This will be well worth a second look in future months.
You Tube Time Maching
(YTTM)
You Tube Time Machine Authors: According to information from the You Tube Time Machine's About page (actually Justin's blog), the site is the 'accidental' project of Justin Johnson and 2 of his Brooklyn colleagues that resulted from a rather casual conversation about their mutual interest in looking at YouTube videos. The three quite literally built the site after their conversation over beer and pizza to be able to search for YouTube videos by specific year.
This tool has enormous potential for teachers at all levels in just about all disciplines to search and share historical footage/artifacts. To test what sorts of videos are collected for less recent years, I set the marker at 1956, my birth year. There are 29 videos for that year already uploaded! I picked one to snip and include as a sample here, a 1956 auto add:
The machine goes back as far as 1860 - yes, there is one recording there from 1860 - reportedly the first ever sound recording!!
B. Podcasting
AudioBoo
Audioboo Authors: AudioBoo is a free web-based audio recording tool (and more) based in London. Listen to their audio introduction here.
AudioBoo describes its tool as 'the simplest way to share audio. Excellent start-up tutorials are available from the site and according to their 'Getting Started' page, 'Audioboo works on the web, iPhone and Android devices. Soon we'll be adding Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile. Our mission is to be the one platform you use when you want to record audio, share it or keep it safe for the future." The tool is intended for 'social' creation and sharing of audio recordings, thus it functions much like other 'social' networks where 'following' others and subscribing to the contributions or 'feeds' of others is possible.
There is a 5 minute/50mb limit on uploads.
To test AudioBoo, I created an account and recorded this:
My podcast 'published' to AudioBoo looks like this (I chose NOT to add an image or geolocation to my recording):
PodBean
Podbean
Authors: PodBean is a service offering podcast hosting and subscribing. The free account offers 100 MB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth per month. Numerous features include analytics. customizable interface themes, and mobile access.
I found the start up information limited and difficult to locate. There are no tutorials as with AudioBoo (at least that I was able to find). I did create an account to test the service, only to find that actual recording of audio is not part of the service provided. The site looks quite similar to a blog dashboard and site once set up. I am not quite sure why one might want such a site since most blogging platforms will accommodate audio files. The user must provide/upload pre-existing audio files to the host site. I did not test the site further, as I did not find this as useful as the AudioBoo services. I would not see myself going back here and wound up deleting the site I created.
C. Miscellaneous:
ToonDoo
ToonDoo Authors: ToonDoo bills itself as a cartoon strip creator...and more! Additional features include options to use clip art, a book maker, language translation options, importing images and the like. According to the 'About us' information provided on the site, ToonDoo is from Jambav, an online game creator...and both are backed by Zoho.
This tool offers a number of options (and frankly, the interface was QUITE busy...so a challenge to navigate to just making a 'toon'). The tools is free, but as usual requires registering for an account. It is possible to share toons via the usual outlets like Twitter and Facebook, as well as subscribing to toons of others via RSS. The account is free, but there is an option to buy print quality high resolution images. There is a ToonDoo Spaces option for a fee to allow 'private and secure' sharing.
I registered for an account (interesting that there ARE TOS, but those are not presented during the registration process). I created the basic toon below and 'published' to my account. I attempted to embed using 3 code options offered, but finally resorted to saving the image as a .png then uploading using the file, upload tool.
This was quite a fun little tool to try out. There are many editing options I only skimmed the surface with. I could see this being useful in a k-12 environment, and might even use it in an online course to post a brief 'announcement' or such. Some of the other tools like the book maker might be more useful. One concern I would have for this and for the tools presented here is accessibility concerns/options.
D. Resource Repository
Thinkfinity
Thinkfinity Authors: Thinkfinity is billed as the location for 'thousands of free lesson plans and educational resources.' This is a quite nice resource repository for k-12 educators and parents. Obviously, the 'host' for the site is the Verizon Foundation, in collaboration with an impressive list of 'content partners' including NEA and ISTE. The S. C. DOE is listed as a State Educator Partner. The site offers typical web 2.0 sharing and collaboration opportunities for members of its 'community'. Registration is required to upload content. In addition to teaching resources and a parents page, the site offers professional development opportunities.
Materials are available via a keyword search, or by searching grade level and/or subject. There is opportunity to connect topics directly to state standards as well. I searched on 'constitution' again and found some nice lessons. When I visited the community area for this topic, however, I found some of the links broken. The site is generally worth a look for the collaboration opportunity, as well as links to many excellent teaching resources.
E. Collaboration Tools
Wallwisher
Wallwisher
Authors: Wallwisher is an online 'notice board maker', or in other words an online version of post-it notes. According to the site's About page, Wallwisher is the work of one primary programmer, Nitesh (@Xiphar on Twitter) who has a particular devotion to paper post-its. He does list his collaborators, that include programmers from the Wufoo site (an online survey tool).
A 'wall' is basically a web page where messages can be posted.
The tool requires no registration/account creation to use (but does need an email address to make it possible to create a temporary account to get back to a wall once it is created) and can accommodate images, music and video in addition to text 'notes'.
This tool could be quite useful in a classroom or even in an online course to offer an opportunity for a quick poll or test of mood or such would be needed. The interactive nature of the wall could engage students and could be used to compare before and after thoughts on subjects of interest.
A demo wall is available here and is reproduced below. The question prompt for this sample is "What do you think about Windows Vista?"
Creating a wall is simple and easy and offers some customizations including a custom url to the wall, background color and who can view/contribute. After setting preferences on the opening page, I received an email containing a url to my wall and a password to be able to access my page after set up. I set preferences so that I could approve each note. I did have to log in with the temporary credential in order to 'approve' the sample note I put up. It would be nicer if the site would notify the wall owner of new notes, but that capability is apparently not available. Notes cannot exceed 160 characters. Notes are added by double clicking anywhere on the wall.
Click here to visit my Wallwisher test wall and post a note or click the image below to go to the wall.
Titan Pad
Titan Pad Authors: Titan Pad is a simultaneous document editor (of the same ilk as EtherPad I mentioned in my introduction) offered by "a team of IT Professionals from Austria". As a matter of fact, the authors indicate that they are trying deliberately to emulate functionalities once offered by EtherPad (Note their logo statement: "We are rescuing EtherPad for your use"). One of their Page Headers even says 'EtherPad'. There are no tutorials or demos on the site. There is a blog which has not been posted to since May. Starting a public page is quite simple though. Clicking one button "Create Public Pad" goes directly to this interface:
To share the pad and commence simultaneous editing, the page creator can either paste the page url into a message (email/IM) or send an email from TitanPad to email recipients. When new 'editors' join the page, their contriubtions show up as different colors of highlighted text. The page includes line numbers to help with referencing particular parts of the page. Several options for saving a page includes as pdf, html, Word file, Open Office file and others. The Time Slider functionalities opens a different synchronized page where all editors are seeing the same versions simultaneously.
This tool has great potential for learning activities where multiple writers can contribute thoughts, ideas at the same time. I have always wished that the wiki tool in Blackboard would allow some of these very functionalities. Unfortunately, there is not much information on the site about whether 'private' pages are possible and if so how to create one. There is opportunity to 'create an account' but I could not tell form their very limited About information what benefit having an account offers. So, at this point it looks like only public documents are possible, so creators of pages should govern their use accordingly in selection material for collaboration in this public space.
Looking at this particular tool has been quite intersting. In the course of this work, I found two other instances for live simultaneous document editing built on EXACTLY THE SAME interface as the Titan Pad snip above. Two of them still bear the EtherPad label. One, TypeWith.me had removed that page title. Of the three, The TitanPad version had more information on their 'home' page and more information available in their 'About' section. The other two tools are Pirate Pad and TypeWith.me. Since these all appear to be the same tool with different names I am including them here/counting them all as one.
Crocodoc
Crocodoc Authors: Crododoc is another online collaboration tool that allows users to share and annotate pre-existing documents in several formats including pdf, Word and PowerPoint files. The authors are MIT collaborators who also developed WebNotes - an online research tool for creating and sharing page annotations. According to the site's FAQ page, each uploaded document is assigned a unique url for sharing. With purchase of a Pro Account, documents can also be password protected (they say using 'bank grade SSL encryption'). Account creation is not required to use, but the free account includes document tracking and upload of files up to 20MB.
To test crocodoc a bit, I created and uploaded a 'test' Word document. I found that in order to be able to 'claim'/ manage/delete the document I had to create an account...so the above info that account creation is not required to use is technically, but not practically correct. I decided not to create yet another account, but snipped the page interface below to show the tools available for marking up a document:
There is potential here for online document collaboration, but there are so many other such tools I'd say crocodoc will have stiff competition in this arena.
Table of Contents
Tool Shed Project
Welcome to my Tool Shed for EDET 603 - Fall semester 2010!I'll have to confess, this 'project' is something I have running in the background all the time. As director of instructional technology at my institution I am always on the lookout for new (and free) tools I can test and recommend to colleagues. I keep a journal (paper and pencil!) on my desk ALL THE TIME to jot down recommendations from my broader network of colleagues I follow via Twitter and RSS subscriptions. I know the paper approach is old school/analog but it works for me. I can add notes about who shared the info and what they had to say about the tool. Sometimes that works very well. Sometimes it comes back to bite. I keep one book per year. The paper works because some of the tools that are wonderful can be rather transient and ethereal. I don't have to purge things out of an electronic file later.
For example, I showed folks Etherpad - a wonderful live editing program that was free/opensource a couple of years ago. Some immediately saw the potential for live editing in a classroom where students were working on a document together. Then Etherpad was bought by Google. Google doc has live editing capability now thanks to Etherpad. And another example is my recommendation of Ning as a host site for groups to collaborate and have access to free tools to support their work. Well, Ning decided earlier this year (as I sure many of you know) to revoke free access and no long provide free sites. So, adoption and use of any of these tools has to come with the 'use/adopt/embrace at your own risk' disclaimer.
All that said, recognizing that an important characteristic of web 2.0 is it's continual state of beta/emergence helps prevent establishing too strong a dependence on any new cool tool. No worries, there will be a newer cooler tool along in just a bit to take it's place! :-)
The tools I am sharing are 'brand new' recommendations since the semester began in August.
A. Research Tools
SweetSearch
Sweet Search
Authors: SweetSearch is a part of Dulcinea Media - a private group who refer to themselves as 'the curator of the internet' with the self-described intent of helping students conduct effective internet research. The group is located in New York and is made up of corporate executives, one librarian, and others. While they claim to have vetted their search returns through 'educators and librarians', details of that process are not provided.
SweetSearch describes its search tool as : "a Search Engine for Students, searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been approved by our staff. SweetSearch allows students to choose the most relevant result from a list of credible results, without the distraction of unreliable sites." According to information provided on the site, search results provided at Sweet Search and Sweet Search4Me have been carefully vetted by educators and/or librarians so that students who use the tool are assured of valid and reliable results.
To test the site a bit, I searched U. S. Consitution ( in honor of upcoming Constitution Day). The first search returns are to guides provided by another Dulcinea Media site - findingDulcinea. These guides may be of interest to teachers planning lessons on the search topic - in this case the U. S. Constitution. The remaining search results are in fact to what most would consider 'reputable' sites, many of which are direct links to .gov resources. I can see that the assurance of such returns might be very helpful to teachers in some circumstances.
While this tool looks quite promising, I am hesitant to recommend it to colleagues since so little information is provided about its authors, vetting process, and real intents and purposes. I include it here mainly because it came recommended by other ed. tech colleagues whom I trust.
fotopedia
Fotopedia
Authors: fotopedia describes itself as a 'community', therefore finding one particular author to cite was a bit of a challenge.
fotopedia claims to be the 'first collaborative photo encyclopedia.' Okay. Finding an explanation of exactly what is meant or intended by that is difficult. The site's mission statementis quite brief. That said, the site does clearly intend to apprehend affordances of web 2.0 in that the collection of 'articles' (with accompanying illustrative photography) is built by community members. This is a 'community owned' repository, in-development and ever-expanding on the basis of the interests and contribution/sharing of community members. Opportunities to add to or share content via things like Twitter, Facebook, delicious, etc are provided as well as capability for embedding slide shows. The fotopedia guidelines for posting explain how flickr accounts and fotopedia postings interact with each other, and how Creative Commons licenses apply.
To test the site, I searched a suggested topic from the hope page: Galapagos Islands. The returns included amazingly beautiful images along with the stub of a text 'article' about the Islands drawn from Wikipedia....this part clearly 'under construction'. Links to related topics are available as well as an interactive map. The site claims to have 39571 articles in place with 567,350 images.
I can see how some of these beautiful images could be very helpful when teaching certain content. But I would say that at this moment, the site is just in its infancy. This will be well worth a second look in future months.
You Tube Time Maching
(YTTM)
You Tube Time Machine
Authors: According to information from the You Tube Time Machine's About page (actually Justin's blog), the site is the 'accidental' project of Justin Johnson and 2 of his Brooklyn colleagues that resulted from a rather casual conversation about their mutual interest in looking at YouTube videos. The three quite literally built the site after their conversation over beer and pizza to be able to search for YouTube videos by specific year.
This tool has enormous potential for teachers at all levels in just about all disciplines to search and share historical footage/artifacts. To test what sorts of videos are collected for less recent years, I set the marker at 1956, my birth year. There are 29 videos for that year already uploaded! I picked one to snip and include as a sample here, a 1956 auto add:
The machine goes back as far as 1860 - yes, there is one recording there from 1860 - reportedly the first ever sound recording!!
B. Podcasting
AudioBoo
Audioboo
Authors: AudioBoo is a free web-based audio recording tool (and more) based in London. Listen to their audio introduction here.
AudioBoo describes its tool as 'the simplest way to share audio. Excellent start-up tutorials are available from the site and according to their 'Getting Started' page, 'Audioboo works on the web, iPhone and Android devices. Soon we'll be adding Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile. Our mission is to be the one platform you use when you want to record audio, share it or keep it safe for the future." The tool is intended for 'social' creation and sharing of audio recordings, thus it functions much like other 'social' networks where 'following' others and subscribing to the contributions or 'feeds' of others is possible.
There is a 5 minute/50mb limit on uploads.
To test AudioBoo, I created an account and recorded this:
My podcast 'published' to AudioBoo looks like this (I chose NOT to add an image or geolocation to my recording):
PodBean
Podbean
Authors: PodBean is a service offering podcast hosting and subscribing. The free account offers 100 MB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth per month. Numerous features include analytics. customizable interface themes, and mobile access.
I found the start up information limited and difficult to locate. There are no tutorials as with AudioBoo (at least that I was able to find). I did create an account to test the service, only to find that actual recording of audio is not part of the service provided. The site looks quite similar to a blog dashboard and site once set up. I am not quite sure why one might want such a site since most blogging platforms will accommodate audio files. The user must provide/upload pre-existing audio files to the host site. I did not test the site further, as I did not find this as useful as the AudioBoo services. I would not see myself going back here and wound up deleting the site I created.
C. Miscellaneous:
ToonDoo
ToonDoo
Authors: ToonDoo bills itself as a cartoon strip creator...and more! Additional features include options to use clip art, a book maker, language translation options, importing images and the like. According to the 'About us' information provided on the site, ToonDoo is from Jambav, an online game creator...and both are backed by Zoho.
This tool offers a number of options (and frankly, the interface was QUITE busy...so a challenge to navigate to just making a 'toon'). The tools is free, but as usual requires registering for an account. It is possible to share toons via the usual outlets like Twitter and Facebook, as well as subscribing to toons of others via RSS. The account is free, but there is an option to buy print quality high resolution images. There is a ToonDoo Spaces option for a fee to allow 'private and secure' sharing.
I registered for an account (interesting that there ARE TOS, but those are not presented during the registration process). I created the basic toon below and 'published' to my account. I attempted to embed using 3 code options offered, but finally resorted to saving the image as a .png then uploading using the file, upload tool.
This was quite a fun little tool to try out. There are many editing options I only skimmed the surface with. I could see this being useful in a k-12 environment, and might even use it in an online course to post a brief 'announcement' or such. Some of the other tools like the book maker might be more useful. One concern I would have for this and for the tools presented here is accessibility concerns/options.
D. Resource Repository
Thinkfinity
Thinkfinity
Authors: Thinkfinity is billed as the location for 'thousands of free lesson plans and educational resources.' This is a quite nice resource repository for k-12 educators and parents. Obviously, the 'host' for the site is the Verizon Foundation, in collaboration with an impressive list of 'content partners' including NEA and ISTE. The S. C. DOE is listed as a State Educator Partner. The site offers typical web 2.0 sharing and collaboration opportunities for members of its 'community'. Registration is required to upload content. In addition to teaching resources and a parents page, the site offers professional development opportunities.
Materials are available via a keyword search, or by searching grade level and/or subject. There is opportunity to connect topics directly to state standards as well. I searched on 'constitution' again and found some nice lessons. When I visited the community area for this topic, however, I found some of the links broken. The site is generally worth a look for the collaboration opportunity, as well as links to many excellent teaching resources.
E. Collaboration Tools
Wallwisher
Wallwisher
Authors: Wallwisher is an online 'notice board maker', or in other words an online version of post-it notes. According to the site's About page, Wallwisher is the work of one primary programmer, Nitesh (@Xiphar on Twitter) who has a particular devotion to paper post-its. He does list his collaborators, that include programmers from the Wufoo site (an online survey tool).
A 'wall' is basically a web page where messages can be posted.
The tool requires no registration/account creation to use (but does need an email address to make it possible to create a temporary account to get back to a wall once it is created) and can accommodate images, music and video in addition to text 'notes'.
This tool could be quite useful in a classroom or even in an online course to offer an opportunity for a quick poll or test of mood or such would be needed. The interactive nature of the wall could engage students and could be used to compare before and after thoughts on subjects of interest.
A demo wall is available here and is reproduced below. The question prompt for this sample is "What do you think about Windows Vista?"
Creating a wall is simple and easy and offers some customizations including a custom url to the wall, background color and who can view/contribute. After setting preferences on the opening page, I received an email containing a url to my wall and a password to be able to access my page after set up. I set preferences so that I could approve each note. I did have to log in with the temporary credential in order to 'approve' the sample note I put up. It would be nicer if the site would notify the wall owner of new notes, but that capability is apparently not available. Notes cannot exceed 160 characters. Notes are added by double clicking anywhere on the wall.
Click here to visit my Wallwisher test wall and post a note or click the image below to go to the wall.
Titan Pad
Titan Pad
Authors: Titan Pad is a simultaneous document editor (of the same ilk as EtherPad I mentioned in my introduction) offered by "a team of IT Professionals from Austria". As a matter of fact, the authors indicate that they are trying deliberately to emulate functionalities once offered by EtherPad (Note their logo statement: "We are rescuing EtherPad for your use"). One of their Page Headers even says 'EtherPad'. There are no tutorials or demos on the site. There is a blog which has not been posted to since May. Starting a public page is quite simple though. Clicking one button "Create Public Pad"
To share the pad and commence simultaneous editing, the page creator can either paste the page url into a message (email/IM) or send an email from TitanPad to email recipients. When new 'editors' join the page, their contriubtions show up as different colors of highlighted text. The page includes line numbers to help with referencing particular parts of the page. Several options for saving a page includes as pdf, html, Word file, Open Office file and others. The Time Slider functionalities opens a different synchronized page where all editors are seeing the same versions simultaneously.
This tool has great potential for learning activities where multiple writers can contribute thoughts, ideas at the same time. I have always wished that the wiki tool in Blackboard would allow some of these very functionalities. Unfortunately, there is not much information on the site about whether 'private' pages are possible and if so how to create one. There is opportunity to 'create an account' but I could not tell form their very limited About information what benefit having an account offers. So, at this point it looks like only public documents are possible, so creators of pages should govern their use accordingly in selection material for collaboration in this public space.
Looking at this particular tool has been quite intersting. In the course of this work, I found two other instances for live simultaneous document editing built on EXACTLY THE SAME interface as the Titan Pad snip above. Two of them still bear the EtherPad label. One, TypeWith.me had removed that page title. Of the three, The TitanPad version had more information on their 'home' page and more information available in their 'About' section. The other two tools are Pirate Pad and TypeWith.me. Since these all appear to be the same tool with different names I am including them here/counting them all as one.
Crocodoc
Crocodoc
Authors: Crododoc is another online collaboration tool that allows users to share and annotate pre-existing documents in several formats including pdf, Word and PowerPoint files. The authors are MIT collaborators who also developed WebNotes - an online research tool for creating and sharing page annotations. According to the site's FAQ page, each uploaded document is assigned a unique url for sharing. With purchase of a Pro Account, documents can also be password protected (they say using 'bank grade SSL encryption'). Account creation is not required to use, but the free account includes document tracking and upload of files up to 20MB.
To test crocodoc a bit, I created and uploaded a 'test' Word document. I found that in order to be able to 'claim'/ manage/delete the document I had to create an account...so the above info that account creation is not required to use is technically, but not practically correct. I decided not to create yet another account, but snipped the page interface below to show the tools available for marking up a document:
There is potential here for online document collaboration, but there are so many other such tools I'd say crocodoc will have stiff competition in this arena.