Collaborative Online Learning

[Danny Mittleman]

This discussion accompanies the discussion I am leading at CAEA on February 4. The CAEA live discussion will focus on the use of blogs and wikis in the classroom, but here we have the opportunity to not only explore those tools (and techniques) deeper, but to talk about other classes of tools as well.

To start, my PowerPoint slides for the February 4 talk are attached.

[Danny Mittleman]

In the talk, there will only be time to discuss blogs and wiki. I mention four blogging platforms:

• Blogger
• TypePad
• WordPress
• LiveJournal

and four wiki platforms:

• PBWiki
• Zoho Wiki
• WikiSpaces
• WetPaint

among the many that exist. But there are other tools that fall outside the discussion on February 4. Some samples are listed below.

If you want your students to form online teams and require a good teaming environment, I suggest Huddle.

If you want your students to collaboratively write documents, you might send them to Google Docs (which is pretty good), but I prefer the Zoho suite of tools. Try Zoho Writer as well. Both Google and Zoho suites include collaborative editors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, but the Zoho suite is far more extensive. And the tools have subtle differences from Google in was that are often improvements. For example, Zoho Writer will import a Word 2007 document, but Google Docs will not.

For student surveys or polling, consider either SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang. Those of you at DePaul can make QuickData available to your students (it is an internal project, but it has some advantages over the free versions of the commercial tools.)

For a private class social network, consider Ning (which this site is published in.)

For virtual presentations, consider either Zoho Meeting, or Vyew.

If students need to create visual models, check out Gliffy.

All of the software listed above is available for free, though most of these companies are willing to sell you more enhanced versions for real money.

If you have other online tools that you like to use in the classroom, please join this conversation and let us know.

[Danny Mittleman]

Elory Rozner passed along this YouTube video called "Wikis in Plain English"