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.

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.