Online Facilitation- Using Collaborative Tools for Information Sharing

 Hi Prospective Facilitators,

Welcome to the second post  in the series on Online Facilitation.

I am here with another informational and intriguing topic. Today we will be looking at the Use of collaborative tools in the online space, to share information.

What are Collaborative Tools?

Essentially, collaborative tools are applications and software that allow people to work together in a more effective and efficient manner. Collaborative tools are used in organizations and also in education. 

Advantages of collaborative tools: Facilitators/Instructor Perspective

These tools help facilitators to monitor what students do in their teams, assess the levels of contribution by each member/student, streamline group/team activities, time saving, instructions or messages can be sent to one place for multiple persons to access, assigning individual task even while being in groups, encourage participation and team comradery.

Advantages of collaborative tools: Student Perspective

Students can use collaborative tools to enhance creativity, it is a unified platform for sharing information, file, etc., enables team discussions(video calls, voice calls, messaging), real time responses, online storage, accessibility, multiple people working on the same document at the same time, and the list goes on.

Examples of collaborative tools include but are not limited to:

  • MS Teams
  • Google Docs(Google Drive)
  • Google sites
  • SharePoint
  • Padlet
  • Canva
  • Mural
  • Skype
  • Slack
  • Trello
  • LucidSpark
  • WebEx
  • DropBox, etc.


The image below represents an actual collaboration between myself and teammates currently enrolled in an online programme. This was done using Padlet.
Image/screenshot from personal Padlet




Photo from Google Images

Check out the video below on using technology to support collaborative learning:


Video from YouTube

Collaboration activity using Canva



Representation from GoogleDocs



Collaborative tools are very useful in getting teamwork completed in a creative, effective, efficient, and cost effective way. The ones mentioned in the post are not the only optioms so feel free to research and explore the tools that exist. Whether you are an employee who is part of a team, a facilitator, or a student, these tools will be of great value to you in the 21st century. I hope that this article will inspire you to explore and utilize these tools to your advantage and development. Cheers!

References

Brush, K. (2022). Team collaboration tools.
     https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/definition/team-
     collaboration-tools

Lai-DuMone, V. (2018, June). Tools to incorporate technology into
     facilitation
. https://www.iaf-world.org/site/global-flipchart/12/tools


Keep Learning!
Simone Sampson

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