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.
Check out the video below on using technology to support collaborative learning:
Video from YouTube
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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