Web Based Collaboration Tools

Web based collaboration tools can create great opportunities for people to work together. In schools, these tools can facilitate student-student projects, teacher-teacher projects, student-teachers projects, and parent-student-teacher projects. With so many ways that people might want to work together, which sites offer the best applications? For this project, I looked at Knotebooks, Twiducate, and GroupTable. 

Knotebooks

     The idea behind Knotebooks is that you can create a personalized web page on a topic for yourself by selecting the just-right level of information under each heading within the page.  The site also allows you to switch out text within a heading for video or other media.  You can then save your customized web page for reference later.  It is kind of like an adjustable text book.  Like Wikipedia, you can also upload your own articles to the website that others may use in their pages. Although I find the idea behind this site fascinating and the site itself to be easy to navigate and use, I was disappointed by the amount of information currently available. In particular, there is little content appropriate for elementary school use at this time.
     This site could also be a great way for teachers to share and find lesson plans like this one.  Again, though, there are not many lesson plans on the site and none that would be appropriate for elementary school teachers. If this site continues to grow and gain in popularity, I would not be surprised if it became a great resource for elementary school teachers even though it is not quite there yet.

Twiducate

Twiducate gives teachers the ability to turn their class into a mini social networking site similar to twitter.  Teachers create the network; then their students each get their own account.  Teachers also have the ability to open their network up to other classes.  The benefit to this site is that it is private; the teacher and students are the only ones seeing content which could keep the site safer.  However, there are two drawbacks that I see to using a site that is private.  First of all, parents may not be able to access the site which would be a loss, and second, when students publish they are not getting to publish to any larger of an audience than if they had just had their work displayed in the classroom.  I can see why some teachers might want to keep their classroom information private, and Twiducate could be a great way to accomplish that.  However, I would not want to use this as my class's only online presence.

 GroupTable

GroupTable is a website that allows members of a group to work together on a project by sharing a calendar, creating a task list, chatting, posting discussions, and uploading documents.  I think that this site offers tools that students could use to work together on group projects or teachers could use to work together on committee projects.  I like that the site allows users to assign tasks to specific individuals and has a calendar for making sure that tasks are completed on time.  I could see myself using this site to work with students doing an expert study or passion project.  However, the uploads section of the site seems a little confusing and would probably require some direct guidance before students could effectively use it on their own.

It was interesting to look at all three of these sites.  Each site put its own spin on online collaboration, and I could see myself using any of them in the future if the situation was correct.

References

Filippazzo, J., & Clark, T. (n.d.). Knotebooks -Anyone can contribute. Everyone can learn.. Retrieved October 16, 2011, from http://knotebooks.com/

GroupTable. Retrieved October 16,2011, from https://www.grouptable.com/

Twiducate-Social Networking for Schools. Retrieved October 16, 2011, from http://twiducate.com/about.php