ICTWEB201 - Collaboration Tools

Collaboration

What is Collaboration?

Why is it important to be able to collaborate online?

How can we use Social Media to Collaborate?

What features would you like to see in an online Collaboration tool?

Online Collaboration Tools 

Online collaboration tools can be split into categories, much like social media. I like to think of them as:

• Whiteboard
• Mind Mapping
• File sharing/Document sharing
• Concept design 
• Project Management/Team Collaboration
• Presentations

Of course there are also tools that have multiple functions.


Pretty much all of the tools that I have included have a reasonable FREE option as well as upgrade/Pro packages.

Whiteboards

This is exactly what it sounds like - a large whiteboard that you can share and collaborate with other people online. They are usually reasonably free-form so you can just start adding your information and/or drawing your ideas out. Team members are invited to join and share.

A Web Whiteboard

https://awwapp.com/

Class Exercise

As this is one of the easiest tools to get started with, we will have a class collaboration exercise

Follow link to join in! (link will go on Facebook)

Topic: Advantages of communicating and collaborating online

Realtime Board

https://realtimeboard.com/

Watch the video to see how this works

Ziteboard

https://app.ziteboard.com/

Twiddla

http://www.twiddla.com/

Mind Mapping

Bubble.us

https://bubbl.us/

MindMup

https://www.mindmup.com

Mind 42

http://mind42.com/

File sharing/Document Sharing

Otherwise known as Cloud Storage, the most popular of these would be

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• OneDrive - Microsoft - integrates with Office Applications
• ZOHO

All of these applications allow you to store your files in the cloud and share and collaborate with others.



I use Dropbox and GoogleDrive, with Dropbox being my first choice in cloud storage. What I love about Dropbox is that it behaves like any normal folder on your computer and so is accessible from any application seamlessly.


Here are a few:

How to use Google Drive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HU9Z5gtQVk

Concept Design

Trello

https://trello.com/

Invision

http://www.invisionapp.com/

Presentation / Slide sharing

Powtoon

https://www.powtoon.com

Watch the video to get an idea of how this application works.

Prezi

https://prezi.com

Project Management/Team Collaboration

There are heaps of Project management tools out there that allow you to collaborate on a project, schedule and allocate tasks and create To Do lists.

https://slack.com/

https://www.twoodo.com/

https://www.agreedo.com/index.html

https://www.wrike.com

https://www.hipchat.com

More tools and Information

Great articles on collaboration tools

http://www.creativebloq.com/design/online-collaboration-tools-912855

http://trendblog.net/6-easy-to-use-online-collaboration-tools-make-teamwork-simple/

Class Activity

Can you find any that I missed? Hint: Yes there are heaps!

Find a free collaboration tool and share details with the class:

• Features
• Plans
• How to sign up/Join

Are there any that allow you to collaborate across devices (i.e. computer, tablet, phone or other mobile device)

Graded Blog Activity

This is the last of your graded Blog Activities for this class. Get a group together and try 2 collaboration tools. In your blog your should indicate:

• What tools you used
• How easy they were to use
• What you get for free
• Would you continue to use or use again if you needed to collaborate.

Project/Presentation Order

So  - who wants to go first? Time to sort out the order.

ICTWEB201 Social Bookmarking, Curating and Discovery

There are a number of tools that fit under one or all of these headings and the distinction between them can get blurred.

Social Bookmarking

You all know how to Bookmark a website that you like - depending on  your web browser it might be called bookmarking or favourites. With social Bookmarking, you can share these bookmarks with other people in your network as well as sort into categories and add tags to allow you to sort or search them based on different criteria. Some also allow you to bookmark and save the article for reading offline.

The following tools are what I would classify as standard or traditional Bookmarking tools.

Delicious

Delicious is probably the first tool that comes to mind when talking about Social Bookmarking. As well as having the basic features, it also has a discovery option and an area where you can subscribe to topics and get links.

http://delicious.com

The above image shows my account with a couple of items bookmarked. Note the ability to add tags so that you can sort and search through your bookmark for sites on a particular topic. You can follow people and have followers and you can set up tags to create your own "feed".

Like other tools in this category, there are apps that you can download that make it easier to bookmark pages.

The following is from their "About" page.

Diigo

This is the one that I have been using since 2009. It also has the basic ability to add bookmarks, create lists and add tags for searching.

https://www.diigo.com/

This is my Diigo page with some of my bookmarks. You can see the various tags on the left hand side.

This image shows my toolbar - you can see that I have a Diigo button for bookmarking. Most social news and social bookmarking have tools that you can add to your toolbar. With the button added to the toolbar, you can bookmark from within the website rather than using cut and paste to add the link.

Diigo, like many other similar tools, has grown and expanded over the years.

Folkd

http://www.folkd.com/

 

Dragdis

https://dragdis.com

I don't know much about this tool and have never used it, but definitely now on my todo list!! It seems to only work with Chrome, but could be quite useful.

Bundlr

http://bundlr.com/

 

For Mac People

http://getstache.com/

Aggregation and Curation

Wikipedia refers to Digital Curation as "Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use."

In social media terms, content curation, aggregation and subscriptions (RSS Feeds - see last week's notes) allows you to bookmark and share web content. It is the next step up from Social Bookmarking as it allows us to keep the content we find interesting in one spot and share it with friends and followers, or just keep it to yourself so that you can read interesting article in your "spare" time.

Pinterest

How does one describe Pinterest? So many of these tools fit into multiple categories, but I think Curation works for this tool.

When installed, Pinterest has a button that you can use to "pin" items as you discover them, building up Pinboards. It is very visual and extremely addictive.

https://www.pinterest.com/

 

Scoop.it

http://www.scoop.it/

Clipzine

http://www.clipzine.me/

Here is a reasonably current list of some content curation tools


http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-curation-tools

and another

http://www.curata.com/blog/content-curation-tools-the-ultimate-list/

Discovery Engines.

Discovery engines go one step further again in that they recommend websites for you based on your interests and how you respond to the sites that it shows you.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon fits into this category. It is a nice random way to find new websites. Tell it what you are interested in and StumbleUpon will recommend websites for you. Great if you have a bit of time to spare!!!

https://www.stumbleupon.com/

Lumi

https://lumi.do/join

All your eggs in one basket (social media dashboard)

I do love this category - not everyone has the time to log in and follow conversations in all of the social media tools that they are members of. You can use these tools to view all of your social media accounts in one place and to post information to all linked accounts at the same time. Some will even allow you to schedule posts

There are two of these that I have used, although there are many more available. Some are just mobile, some started out as mobile and now available on multiple platforms, and some are web based.

Flipboard

https://flipboard.com

This is now available across multiple platforms, but works particularly well with my iPad. Flipboard is very visual and refers to itself as a Magazine. You can include a range of social media accounts as well as follow a variety of topics on Flipboard.

iPad

Below are some screen dumps from my iPad

And from the Web app.

Hootsuite

https://hootsuite.com

Hootsuite is not quite as pretty as Flipboard, but allows you to see at a quick glance, all of your linked social media accounts.

iPhone

Web

Class Activity 1

Which tools from today's class have you used? Do you think they should be included as Social Media tools? Why? Why not?

If you were to try something like Stumble Upon, what 5 topics would you choose and why.

Can you find any other tools that you would classify as "Discovery". How useful do you think they are? Do you get different results to using the same criteria using Google?

What do you see as the benefits of using a curation tool? Have you used one before? what did you use it for? What could you use it for (if you haven't used one before)?

ASSESSMENT ACTIVITY

This week's activity is to join and use (for a few days) one of the tools listed in any of the categories above. Write a Blog post on what tool you tried, what you liked or didn't like, and whether you would continue to use it.