[japhyr]

I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to start encouraging students to write in Markdown instead of Word. It would be a lot easier to do that with an application like this. But I haven't looked into it too closely, so I'm not sure what the best tools are for starting to use Markdown with students.

[auxym]

What? Why? Word and md/html solve quite different problems, the way I see it. Word is very much for paper-oriented documents while md/html are for screen-first.

Word is far from my favorite document preparation system [1] (let's call it that), but it still has many advantages over markdown,

* Html rendering has no concept of pagination. Paginating naively from html (ie printing from a browser) makes ugly documents.

* Word has tools for managing references and bibliography generation

* Also automatic numbering and referencing of tables, figures, etc.

Those are just OTOH features I'd consider important for writing a high school history report or whatever. If this were word '97 we were talking about, I'd understand, but modern Word is a quite powerful tool.

I don't mean to bash or disrepect, just genuinely curious if you'd considered this or you had specific reasons for switching to markdown.

[1] I've really been liking LyX for the past years, but it might be a bit much for your typical high school student. I've been considering trying out an asciidoc -> docbook -> (latex -> pdf or straight docbook to html) workflow. Maybee ascii would interest you, similar plain-text formatting like md but more full featured.

[japhyr]

Fair questions.

Word works well for students' final work, but it seems to get in the way when students are building their understanding of a topic. I like that Markdown has enough formatting options to organize a document, but not so many options that people get lost in modifying fonts and font sizes, etc.

I'm curious to see if using Markdown while doing exploratory assignments would help students focus more on the information they're learning and documenting, rather than how the final document looks. I'd also like to expose students to a different approach to structuring documents; for many of them, they haven't used anything other than Word.

[dredmorbius]

Printing from the browser has far more to do with the fundamental error of allowing a site's designer to specify formatting than any inherent limitations of HTML. It's possible to create semantic content from a browser page (e.g., with Pandoc or Calibre) and print that. I actually resort far more often than I care to admit to re-tagging content and rendering it either as simplified HTML, Markdown, or LaTeX, for readability's sake.

[andmalc]

No disrespect to the OP but the Stackedit editor at https://stackedit.io would be good. No software to install and loads of options for synchronizing and publishing their notes.

[japhyr]

Stackedit looks great, thanks for the reference.

[Dewie]

I guess the simplest thing would just be to first introduce them to some simple rules, like "this is how you indicate a header", "this is how you indicate emphasis (like italics)".

After all, isn't conventions like that for plain text writing how markdown emerged in the first place?

[japhyr]

Teaching the rules is straightforward, I just don't know the available tools very well. I use Markdown on GitHub mostly.

My students will need to print more of their work than I do, they'll want to work on their local filesystem most of the time, and they'll want to work on documents at home as well. I haven't followed the Markdown ecosystem well enough to know which tools to recommend to students and staff, so I appreciate hearing about new tools like the ones mentioned in this thread.