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Ideas for Encouraging Collaboration and Creativity Part I: how to collaborate virtually

How to collaborate virtually

If you are working in different geographical areas and struggle to meet regularly then you need to find easy yet effective solutions to ensure that your collaboration does not suffer. Also, these ideas work well if you simply wish to kick-start the collaboration before meeting. Here follows a series if ideas that could help maintain a continuous creative working relationship:

Wallwisher: the creative wall

Wallwisher.com: great for sharing ideas – click to view example

Wallwisher.com is an online notice board where you create the content by adding interactive stickies to the board. This online tool is superb to use get the creative flare sparked up amongst colleagues. Sign up and start your own wall, then your co-workers can upload images, share ideas and links. Wallwisher is ideal to use a couple of days before the big planning meeting as it gets everyone thinking, then you start the meeting by going through the team’s examples.

The Creative Blog:

Blogs are commonplace nowadays and the list of blogging software is growing steadily and it’s fairly straightforward to set one up having little or no coding experience. The idea behind the creative blog is to keep a running discussion on a key issue, and change the issue regularly. For example, one school comes up with the topic for discussion and the teachers share ideas by adding comments. One particularly good way of keeping the creative flow going is to have regular times when staff or departments add their thoughts e.g. at Department Meetings. At the end of the set time frame, e.g. every half term, the post is printed to PDF or Issuu /ZinePal for easy sharing and to put the creative thoughts onto paper.

Simple Video-Conferencing:

You might have tried to do video-conferencing but you found it slow with poor audio and video quality? Although some methods are still annoyingly poor, some tools are in fact very good e.g. MikoGo.com . This service is not only free but also very straight forward and all you have to do is to register and download the MikoGo widget which you use to meet online.

Each time you want to start a session simply launch MikoGo and copy the session ID and then email/phone whoever you are meeting with and they enter the session ID – done! If you are doing vid-conf individually then inbuilt or basic webcams are fine. However, if you want to capture more than one person you’d benefit from a Point Tilt and Zoom video camera. They can be pricey but there are cheaper alternatives. The PTZs are great as they enable you to involve people around the room by ‘Pointing’ the camera and then zooming in on the person.

Collaborative Mapping:

This process is simple and only requires the people involved to sign up to a mind-mapping website that allows for sharing and collaborating on the same mind-map. There are many such tools available like for example:

CoMapping.com $25/year (approx £15): This is a superb tool as it gives users the possibility of collaborating on the same map at the same time.

Bubbl.us Free: Another solid application where people can work together on the same maps although not at the same time.

The strength of these types of online tools lay in the opportunity to sketch out rough ideas whilst at the same time build on each others’ thoughts. Many of such mind-mapping websites also give users to possibility of uploading images, adding links and even documents of various kinds. These more powerful features tend to involve a nominal charge, like with CoMapping (or MindMeister.com), but it is worth the money spent as you can lead, develop and collaborate on very large projects quickly and easily without much delay or complications. We have worked with both teachers and students on different projects and everyone agrees that it made collaborating more engaging and efficient – students benefited greatly during group work particularly when it involved a longer independent learning project spanning across a half-term as they could continue to work from home or simply just uploading documents, images and audio files to use when they returned to school.

If you haven’t tried any if these ideas yet then why not use one or two of the examples with a current collaboration, you will not regret it.

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Create meaningful and relevant stories with a difference

Add stories, photos and sounds to map — Create living maps with sound, stories and images

One way of creating meaning and relevance behind stories is to use illustrations and photos of various kinds. An even more powerful way is to add sound to a story to really capture a particular moment or event. Imagine including all of these features and add them to the exact location on a map. This is what MapSkip offers its users: create stories around a particular place.

After registering with the website find a location you wish to write about, for example the Normany landings in 1944 or example of coastal erosion on the North Norfolk coast, add a ‘marker’ in the shape of a hand and a small box with a form will appear and you can give the place a name. Now you can also upload a photo or drawing, and why not include an MP3 file which captures the fierce fighting during D-Day landings? Another good idea could be to create longer investigations with a class and keep adding to the map as you work through a unit, for example as they discover more about an individual’s journey, they can create a very detailed, meaningful and relevant story about this person.What about producing sound-trails or interviews from your locality and add them to your map like a local study?

Imagination is everything with this tool and students tend to think of 100s of ideas about how they can demonstrate their understanding of a topic or unit. This is a superb educational tool and one worth exploring further.

Reflections on Social Media in Education part 1

The world we live in today shows “…the largest increase in expressive capability in human history”, according to Clay Shirky. He explains the significance of new and emerging technologies such as Social Media and demonstrates clearly that the way we communicate with each other has changed immensely. Clay Shirky gives the example of the Sichuan earthquake where the BBC found out about the terrible event via Twitter.com and that the last time China had had an earthquake by such magnitude it took more than three months before the the Chinese government released details about the event.

Shirky emphasises the point that new tools such as Twitter and FaceBook help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). Mr Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election in June 2009 and the subsequent protests, some of which were violent, generated immense global interest. Twitter became a genuine tool which many protesters used to spread what was taking place, including uploading images of some of the worst clashes between protesters and military. We followed updates using ‘hashtags’ in Twitter. These hashtags are added to your post which act like a mini channel which others can follow and read so for example during the Iran elections protesters used #iranelections to only follow updates from what was happening. There were even websites such as Mashable that provided readers with guides on how to follow the elections via Twitter.

It seems that many counties in the UK have opted to ban, block or discourage the use of Twitter, or any Social Media tool for that matter, as Twitter can leave students open to a range of different problems. The interesting question is of course: Shouldn’t we use Twitter in the classroom so that students learn how to use it well and about potential issues with social media so they know what to do and what to look out for? It is crucial that teachers and educators give students the right skills to be able to use these new online tools. There are some teachers and educators that do use Twitter well to engage and challenge students to learn and those who are new to WEB 2.0 tools must be shown the way.

On Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky’s talk can be found on TED.com. Make a cup of coffee (or tea!) and enjoy 20-odd minutes of brilliance. If you found his talk interesting then do not hesitate to buy his book which is equally fascinating: Here Comes Everybody: how change happens when people come together . In a similar vein, Charles Leadbeater has also examined the way we communicate and collaborate nowadays in his brilliant book We Think : not mass production, mass innovation.

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