Collaborate Online: Easy Places to Share Ideas

Google Docs (docs.google.com)

Google Docs is a collaborative Microsoft Office alternative. With Google Docs you can easily share documents, spreadsheets, forms, drawings, presentations, groups of files and even single files. With customizable privacy options, from completely open to completely closed, you and your collaborators can edit each object while others are working on it...or, as the owner of the object, you can let them only view as you make your changes.

Everything is saved to the Google cloud so it is accessible anywhere you have an internet connection, or easily downloaded. Many of the features are the same as Microsoft Office including comments, word count, and spell check. An easy and cheap alternative to those without Office or an amazing collaborative tool between you and students or you and your colleagues.

Blogger (www.blogger.com)

Blogs carry a stigma of being an “online diary”. While this was certainly true, particularly when the accessibility of the internet began to reach more and more people, today blogs can also carry out a cousin of that doctrine: they are an extremely efficient mode of communication and collaboration. We designed our seminar around the idea of the blog as a collaborative tool. Shawn designed the blog and the posts, and I came back later to edit and flesh out content. Not only did we collaborate but we’ve presented our information in a clear, effective manner using the tools Blogger has to offer. The posts are tagged to make information easy to access and we have embedded the numerous videos, documents and pictures necessary to the presentation. Blogs can be used to assign homework, convey information, re-post lectures, or build a class project.