[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.