Help! I Have to Work in a Group.

As you all are getting settled into the semester, I’m guessing some of you are doing some early prepping for a collaborative assignment. Perhaps? We’ve all gotten to “participate” in a group assignment at some point, and will likely have to again. So, with that idea in your head, how about some ideas on how to make collaboration a little easier…particularly if you are an online student, a commuter student, or just plain don’t like people.

• Document Sharing

  • Dropbox–free (to a point). You can house a specific amount of documents (somewhere around 2G).

  • Flow: Offered by ProQuest, the free version is available to academic users only and allows 2G of storage space and up to 10 collaborators. There are institutional options, but they are cost based.

  • Evernote: Mostly free, but works better as a document storage, option. If you were creative you could definitely utilize this.

  • Google Drive: Free! Google gives each user a TON of space and you can share documents in specific ways (allowing only people with the link or adding editors).

• Meeting Space

  • Skype: Free! You can set up sessions pretty easily and people can participate in anyway they are comfortable: talk, text, and video w/mic. There is an app for that so you could work from a tablet or phone

  • Google Hangouts: Free and getting very popular. Allows for talk, text, or video. People can participate via text from phones or text enable device. There is an app for this, so tablets and smartphones are good too.

  • Adobe Connect–Not Free…yet. Great for online classes as it allows for each person to take over the screen as desired. Can be talk, text or video. Allows for screen sharing and slide sharing.

  • Twitter Hashtags–Free. This option would get a little confusing, but you could actually tweet your collaborators using a specific #hashtag. Follow the hashtag on Twitter, TweetChat, TweetDeck, etc.

• Artsy Projects: Need something pretty to show the class?

  • Glogs (free!): The best description is: a web based poster. You design a virtual poster board using the huge collection of options available. These can be printed out, if need be.

  • Google Sites (free!): You could make your own website. It’s incredibly user friendly, and can be reasonably customized.

So, those are a few options for collaboration. These are all options for those of you working outside of Canvas (or other course management system). I hope these will come in handy for you all! Good luck folks!