| 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. |
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.