Using Collaborative Tools

“Complete a project without physically speaking to each other… what!?” Those were my initial thoughts when Dr. Z told us that we had to do a project without speaking to each other at all physically and being in different places as we worked on it. We got onto Google Docs and started typing away. We agreed that we wanted to know what the most used and favored technology was in our class. Since we are all educational technology minors we thought it would be interesting to see what technology our class was the most comfortable with. Here is a link of our survey that we used. I also discovered tinyurl.com which is an absolutely fascinating tool! It shortens the webpage into just a few words that the user can actually select.

After we got our results back we were once again back on Google Docs trying to figure out what to do with them. Google Spreadsheet was a great tool to use because it provided us with graphs and charts based on the responses. We used those to create our power pointpresentation and then a video of the results. To create the video we used Jing. Since we were all unfamiliar with it we ended up getting together and creating the video.

Once we were finished with everything, I realized how simple it all was. It actually is so easy to use collaborative tools and not have to worry about where to meet with your group and what time best works for everyone. We only used Google Docs, but we could have Skyped, texted each other, tweeted, and used many other tools.