Communication+and+Collaboration

The Internet started as a communication and collaboration tool. But we have come a long way from text based e-mail and bulletin boards. I would like to focus my discussion here on the newest crop of tools that are of particular interest to teachers.

Moving beyond web pages and basic communication, collaboration tools allow people to intuitively work together in multiple environments. These sorts of collaborative possibilities are just starting to really come into their own. For many years this active collaboration was a great idea, but implementation was either extraordinarily expensive, features were limited, capacity was limited, or the complexity of making it all work was too much. But no longer.

The options are extraordinary these days. Below I list a selection of tools, but first I'd like to just provide my own reflection on some of these tools.

First would be the social networking options. While Facebook presents a range of problems due to the complete openness that presents, there are multiple protected versions that work well. At SUNY Schools they use Blackboard, which frankly I find a bit dated and weak in terms of tight functionality and easy collaboration. I've been most impressed by mybigcampus.com, which seams to have the best comprehensive set of tools with intuitive functionality. There is also moodle and edmodo, and I am sure many more. Which tool is selected is really up to the school or school district. I think it matters less about which tool is used than having the resources to properly train and encourage everyone to use the full potential of the tools available.

Beyond those tools are a huge quantity of tools that allow the teacher to push information to the students, and which the students can use to push information back to the teacher. Wiki's are one of best I have seen - and you see that demonstrated here. This site was created as an assignment (student pushing information to teacher), but I quickly turned it into a resource to push information out to colleagues - test prep resources and my work on accountability measurements. I certainly plan to use wiki's in my classes.

But it does not stop there. Tools like educreations and youtube - which I have already described, allow teachers to create lessons and demonstrations. Taking those files and combining them with other presentations of the same content from another teacher, student or someone else altogether allows a teacher to put together a set of resources for students. Gone are the days of simply relying on textbooks. Now teachers must combine resources - using lectures, video, content lessons, demonstrations, games, hands on application and more to be sure to maximize the ability of students to integrate and apply the information.

Then there are tools like shelfari (Amazon) and goodreads (Facebook) that allow people to share what they read. For collaborative authoring, bookemon allows people to write, edit and publish books. Then there are the plethora of online authoring tools like slide rocket, prezi, calemeo, empressr and more. Even the online office suites like zoho, Microsoft office 365, google docs and others provide forums for easy online collaboration.

The key to these tools is that everyone have good access and commitment to learning and using them. What is great is that they are all getting more intuitive and more powerful as we go along.

Wiki’s for you to explore:
 * Sean Otis's Wiki
 * Alissalovestoread Wiki
 * Briana Walsh's Wiki (Note - this may be set to private)
 * Janet Briggs' Wiki
 * Brian Graham's Wiki
 * Bernadette's FACS Wiki
 * Kishine Seiichi's Wiki
 * Candice Vandyke London's Wiki
 * And last, but not least, our noble Professor [|Paul Rubeo's Wiki]

Here is an outline of the various tools.

i. Learning management systems
 * 1) Blackboard
 * 2) Mybigcampus
 * 3) Moodle
 * 4) Edmodo

ii. Webconferencing/Videoconferencing
 * 1) Adobe Connect
 * 2) Blackboard/Elluminate live
 * 3) Webex
 * 4) Gotomeeting

iii. Videoconferencing
 * 1) Skype
 * 2) OoVoo
 * 3) Polycome
 * 4) Tandberg
 * 5) Cisco
 * 6) Facetime

iv. Mobile Apps!

v. Flipped classroom recording
 * 1) Educreations
 * 2) Showme
 * 3) Blackboard mobile
 * 4) Smart Recorder
 * 5) Jing
 * 6) Screencast-o-matic
 * 7) Vodcasting
 * 8) Screenchomp
 * 9) Camtasia

vi. Blogs, Wiki’s,– hosting flipped classrooms
 * 1) Wordpress
 * 2) Blogger (Google)
 * 3) Wikispaces
 * 4) PBWiki
 * 5) My Big Campus
 * 6) Google Sites
 * 7) Pen.io
 * 8) Schoolwires
 * 9) Weebly
 * 10) Ning

vii. Podcasting
 * 1) Garagebank
 * 2) Audacity

viii. Techniques
 * 1) Flipped classroom
 * 2) http://wappingersschools.org/Page/252
 * 3) http://flipteaching.com
 * 4) http://www.khanacademy.org/
 * 5) http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flippedclassroom-best-practices-andrew-miller
 * 6) Virtual Fieldtrips

ix. Youtube

x. Publishing
 * 1) [|Bookemon]
 * 2) Calaméo