[MUSIC] Welcome to 21st Century Skills Collaboration Tools. Think back to the animation video about the construction project in the last module. The focus was on understanding the details of the construction problem before picking a construction tool. We're going to keep that same idea as we try to understand the type and nature of problems related to collaboration. We have divided web 2.0 tools into eight categories. You can see those categories in this figure. In this module we'll focus on collaboration. So if you've identified your instructional task or issue as one related to collaboration. Then the next step is to understand the nature of the collaboration problem. Working in diverse teams and understanding flexibility and responsibility as a team member is an asset in real-life work. Collaboration continuum shown here is a way to understand the nature of a collaboration task. The continuum shows three forms of collaborative task, project management, co-creation and resource management. This continuum is also a way to group and arrange your Web 2.0 collaboration tools. But remember, this is just one way you can group and arrange Web 2.0 collaboration tools for yourself in other ways based on your skills and interest. What do you think is the nature of the collaboration issue that you're having in your classroom? Let's look at some examples on this continuum. One of the areas we have identified is project management, designing plans creating calendars, managing schedules, and dealing with workflow for a group project, are important parts of project management. Many teachers use Assign-A-Day, a Web 2.0 calendar tool to create a class calendar that can be shared with students and their parents. In order to keep them notified about latest assignments and due dates. Other Web 2.0 Tools like Doodle provide an easy way to set up group meetings dynamically. Todoist lets you manage task and then collaborate on setting and working on those tasks. These are examples of Web 2.0 tools that can help you manage your project and streamline your work. Collaboration is also about discussing new thoughts and brainstorming ideas together. For example, teachers might encourage their students to develop concepts for a group assignment using the Web 2.0 Tool Concept Board. Other Web 2.0 tools, like Google Drive, allow realtime collaborative editing on documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Web 2.0 tools like Mindomo allow groups to brainstorm ideas. These Web 2.0 tools focus on co-creation, collaborating to create, edit and develop ideas. One of the critical parts of collaboration is for group members to be able to access communal storage space in order to share new resources and manage different contributions of group members. For example, a teacher might ask students working on a group project to share the links to the various resources they found on the web and use a social bookmarking Web 2.0 tool called Symbaloo. Students and the teacher are all able to see and access the final set of resources. Other ways to share and manage resources are through a Web 2.0 tool called Dropbox. Where various types of files and media can be stored as well as shared with a group of people. Web 2.0 tools like Wiki Dot allow users to create real time editing space for both text and multimedia files. You might have already noticed that a few of these collaboration tools could also be called communication tools. Many of the tools that you will explore in this course, and later, on your own, can be categorized under different categories and used for more than one type of instructional issue. Conversely, you may find that you will use more than one Web 2.0 tool to accomplish an instructional task. However, you will find that most Web 2.0 tools have a primary function and perhaps several secondary functions. Apart from multiple features in a tool, we already know that there are hundreds of Web 2.0 collaboration tools with more appearing every day. I want to reiterate that it's crucial to understand the type and nature of an instructional issue or task in order to be able to choose a specific tool with just the right features that can help solve the instructional issue that you're having. Let's look at a short example. Let's imagine that you're a history teacher and you want your students to collect pictures of important historical places as part of their World History class. Your task is to set up an online repository where students can upload pictures in folders organized by country. Then all the students can access the site to use the collected pictures in their history projects throughout the year. Since you want the students to manage and share files, it's a collaboration task. The next step is to find out more about the nature of the problem. You want all of your students to upload and organize the historical pictures by country. And store them in a location that is readily accessible to all the other students to use. You also want a large enough space to store the pictures. In other words, the problem is managing and sharing resources. Now that you've figured out the nature of the collaboration issue, you need to find a Web 2.0 collaboration tool that supports the management of resources and has features that closely match the task that you want your students to do. Google Drive is a great online storage service from Google. It allows users to store and organize various types of documents and multimedia files and gives users plenty of space in a free account. You can also share the files and folders as links. OneDrive is another great online storage service from Microsoft that allows users to store and organize various types of documents and multimedia files. And it also gives you sort of plenty of space and a free account. You can also share the files and folders as lengths. Voila. Both these Web 2.0 tools match the criteria for the solution you're looking for and could solve the instructional problem presented. So we see yet again that closely matching the type and nature of the instructional problem or task with the features of the Web 2.0 tool can help us in accomplishing the task effectively and efficiently. I hope this short presentation gave you some ideas about Web 2.0 collaboration tools. Now let's learn how you can identify and choose a Web 2.0 tool for one of the teaching scenarios. [MUSIC]
