Etherpad and Synchronous Text Editing

I recently received my beta invite to EtherPad, a real time text collaboration tool. So far, I like it.  It allows multiple people to edit the same document simultaneously – with none of that pesky document jumping that happens in Google Docs.  Each person editing the document has their own color and you can immediately see who has typed what. There’s also a built-in text chat feature (nice, but I’d prefer voice chat) and a few options (e.g. whether to see line numbers). There is no rich text support and you can’t export  (features I would like to see added) but since it’s in beta perhaps those things will be added.

Although I haven’t done extensive testing yet, I can tell already that I would use this tool in a number of situations.  For example, during meetings everyone could be reading and taking notes – very handy for making sure that we’re all all the same page.  Also, for the classroom, I can see teams of students collaborating on any number of writing assignments or planning out team projects.

EtherPad seems to work fine on windows and mac – I tried IE7, Firefox, and Safari and had the same experience on all those browsers and across platforms.

If you’re looking for a way to synchronously work on documents, visit EtherPad and request an invite.  I think you’ll enjoy it.

Notely helps students get organized

Organization, study skills, and time management are three very important skills for any learner, but especially for distance learners.  If you want to help your students build these skills, have them try out Notely.

With Notely, students have one space for all their course notes, schedules, to-do lists, brainstorming sessions, contacts, uploaded files, and more.  They can also add friends so they can share notes and materials. As an added bonus, there are mobile phone and iPhone versions of this software so students can stay connected from anywhere.

xTimeline

Most of us teach courses that involve covering a little historical perspective of our topic, but learning those dates is not really high on our students’ lists of exciting activities!  But, with xTimeline, students just might find it a bit more engaging.  This web-based application lets individuals or groups create public or private timelines in a very easy, intuitive way.  I can completely see this being useful for everything from group project planning to individual or group efforts at creating timelines for everything from the history of a topic to the sequence of events in a novel. 

I created and posted an example of how I might use it to plan out my huge wiki project. Enjoy!

Online Presentation Tools

Teachers and students frequently find it necessary to present something . Often, in the online world, that means either sharing already created presentations online or creating presentations online.

Share Presentations Online
Most faculty often have previously created presentations that they would like to use. Online services such as MyPlick, AuthorStream, and SlideShare are quite handy for this. I’ve posted the same presentation to all three services so you can compare them: MyPlick example, AuthorStream example, SlideShare example

Create Presentations Online
However, other software gives you ability to create presentations online from scratch! And, those are the ones I’d like to chat about in this post! Three tools, in particular, caught my eye: Preezo, PrezentIt, and Spresent.

Preezo, a very PowerPoint-like tool, is a good choice if you want to create a quick online presentation. Once you’ve created it, you can publish it to the web, email it, or embed it in a blog with a simple click of a button. If you’re already using PowerPoint, this tool will feel very familiar and easy to use.

If you’re looking for a presentation tool that is fairly easy to use and can also support online collaboration, then perhaps you might like PrezentIt. Interesting features include slide transitions, public and private options, and commenting tools. One downside, however, is that although you can invite multiple people to collaborate, you can’t do synchronous collaborations.

Spresent is a full-featured presentation tool that allows for inclusion of audio, video, charts, and other content. This is the tool for you if you need to create multimedia-rich, highly interactive presentations. Of course, because of all the cool options, this tool is a bit more challenging to learn.

Scheduling Collaboration Time

I frequently ask learners to collaborate on assignments and, often, one of their frustrations with that has been the immense amount of time it normally takes to find a time they can all get together. Since I experience these woes in the workplace all the time and hadn’t yet found the solution, I have been unable to help them with this. Until now.

TimeToMeet and TimeBridge are two tools that I’ve recently run across that might be at least a partial answer to the challenge of scheduling time to meet and collaborate.

TimeToMeet gives you to mark up a calendar with your available times and then send a link to that calendar to as many people as you need to invite. Each person also marks in their available dates and the software figures out which time slots are available for every person.

TimeBridge works slightly differently. Instead of listing all your available times to find an overlap, you recommend some specific event times and then the software provides all your invitees the opportunity to say which of the proposed times will work for them. The system tallies these votes and lets you know which works.

TimeToMeet seemed easier to use for creating events. TimeBridge was slightly easier to use to respond to invites. I like TimeToMeet better because it finds overlaps in people’s schedules rather (a more democratic approach, it seems) while TimeBridge seems to be a more top-down (“These are the date/times available – choose one!”) approach. TimeToMeet has a personal secretary feature (make your available times known to people so they can schedule meetings with you more easily) that seems pretty darn cool. Overall, I think my favorite is TimeToMeet but stay tuned for an in-depth review of both – I may just change my mind after using them both for awhile.

Group Collaboration the Wiki Way

A wiki, according to that most famous wiki, Wikipedia, is a web application that allows multiple editors to add, remove, and edit content. In short, they are great tools for group collaborations in which many people need to co-create documents.

There are quite a few (read, tons!) of wikis*. Some are quite easy to use (e.g., PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Stikipad) and others are a bit more challenging (e.g., Wikispot, Wikidot, and @Wiki). Some have just a few basic features (basic if you are used to high-powered wikis such as those that use media wiki); others are quite robust and include things like basic content management features (Cospire comes to mind) or include a blog (e.g., Netcipia)

So, how do you choose? Well, ask yourself a few basic questions:

1. Is this a brief wiki encounter or do you have long-term plans? If this is just a small or short-lived project, go with PBWiki, Wikispaces, or Stikipad. Otherwise, invest a bit of time to learn Wikispot, Wikidot, or @Wiki because they have much more robust management features.
2. Are your users tech-savvy or do they just need a simple tool to get the job done? If they’re not particularly tech-savvy, go with PBWiki or Wikispaces. They’re more friendly to use.
3. Do you want to be able to embed video, audio, and some widgets? If so, go with any of the ones listed below except Stikipad.

*Note: For this post, I’m only writing about wikis that have free hosting services and are not specialized (e.g. Google Docs); however, if you’re the intrepid type, you can always go the host-your-own route – see the Wiki Matrix to find something that works for you.

Try ‘em Out
In order to really know which wiki works for you, you have to each one for a test spin. Of course, some folks don’t like to create all those new accounts to find just the right tool – that’s why you read this blog, right? Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and created several different wikis for you to test out without (in most cases) having to create an account! All of them are related to using wikis in higher education, so be prepared to write down an idea or two! Thanks!

• PBWiki (password – wihe-guest)
• Stikipad
• Wikispaces
• Wikispot
• Wikidot
• Netcipia
• Cospire (must create login to edit)

Further resources

• Wiki Matrix – A great tool to help you compare wikis and narrow down the field so you can find the wiki that is most suitable for your needs.

• 7 Things You Should Know About Wikis – an EDUCAUSE article that gives a nice summary about wikis.

• Wiki in Education – A list of articles written about wikis and their use in education.