Collaboratively search with SearchTeam

Almost no one works in isolation anymore. We’re all part of teams and committees who are attempting to do all sorts of things together. Maybe we’re joint authoring a paper or developing a presentation. Maybe we’re planning some event together or creating a lesson that we’ll coteach. Regardless of the task, we are working in world where collaboration is central to many of the activities that we undertake.

To better reflect the collaborative nature of the working world, many educators are building more group activities into their classrooms. They’re using tools like Google Docs and wikis to help students work with one another. While these are tremendously beneficial to collaborative activities, I’d like to add SearchTeam to the list of tools that can foster collaboration. SearchTeam is built on a simple principle: search the Internet with others. With SearchTeam, users can search the Web with their friends, classmates, colleagues and others they trust. The best part is that the searching and sharing is done in real-time so users can find and share what they need from the Web easily.  You will need to create an account with SearchTeam to save your searches and to share them with others.  Otherwise, the site is easy to use and is a really novel entity online.  In a way, it takes the best from web browsers like Google and Bing and combines them with the social features of Delicious and Digg.  SearchTeam is definitely a useful application for anyone planning to work in a team online.

SearchTeam would also be a useful tool to build into a group classroom assignment.  In a way, Google Docs and wikis represent the end products in the collaboration process.  While the revision histories in these sites allow educators to view how a document evolves, they don’t capture how a group conducted its research or how it vetted information online.  With a tool like SearchTeam, educators can take a peak into how a group chose different resources and how they determined which information was valuable.  SearchTeam can give an educator a window into the starting points of a group’s collaboration and their research.

To check out all of the features that SearchTeam offers, be sure to check out the following video tour:

Exploring group video conferencing options

Most people are familiar with Skype, which is the most popular video calling site online.  As I’ve written before, Skype is a one stop communication tool, allowing real time chat and voice & video calls to users around the world.  For the longest time, however, Skype didn’t support group calls.  You could call your all of friends in Finland as long as they all huddled around a single webcam.  While Skype worked on adding the group calling option, other sites got into the video conferencing act.  This week, I’m featuring several sites that offer video conferencing at different prices points and with different features.  Each of the sites would be excellent tools for educators to foster real time conversations with colleagues and students who need to meet from a distance.  Educationally, the sites would be a great way to assemble speakers from around the world to present to a class or for an online instructor to provide tutoring to an online student.  While these sites offer educational benefits, we must also identify the economic benefits as well.  As travel costs continue to rise, video conferencing will grow in popularity and will become more standard practice in education.  Each of these sites will help get you started with video conferencing.

Skype:

While Skype only recently added group calls, I really like how they’ve built this functionality into their platform.  A Skype user needs to have a Premium account to start a group call, but then can call up to nine other people.  Skype offers a seven day free trial so users can test the feature out and a day pass so set up a handful of group calls for a specific day.   A Premium day pass is only $4.99 and a Premium subscription is only $8.99 a month.  These are hardly outrageous prices for what the site offers.

ooVoo:

ooVoo has been around for a while but for some reason doesn’t have the name recognition that Skype has.  Like Skype, ooVoo offers free video calls to users from around the world.  Unlike Skype, however, ooVoo has supported free group conferencing for up to three callers for years.  In addition to its free service,  ooVoo offers different subscription levels.  An ooVoo premium account costs $10 a month and supports 5 way video conferencing.  An ooVoo Premium account costs $30 a month and supports 6 way video conferencing.    If adding one extra caller sounds pretty expensive, a Premium account also offers additional features like screen sharing and increased storage capacity.  If you’d like to take ooVoo Premium for a spin, the site offers a free 30 day trial.

FaceFlow:

FaceFlow is relatively new video site.  It supports up to four callers and doesn’t require any downloads to work.  Users can video chat with one another or watch a YouTube video together.  My only reservation about the site is that it also supports a “random video chat system” that sounds eerily similar to Chatroulette, a site that understandably received a lot of negative press last year.  Used appropriately, however, FaceFlow would be a great way to assemble four people to video conference in an inexpensive manner.

iMeet:

iMeet is an enterprise quality video conferencing site that is pretty expensive for educators ($69 a month!).  The site offers a free 30 day trial, however, which might be helpful if an educator is trying to organize a group meeting with some colleagues.  The site supports up to 15 video feeds at a time and also allows users to phone into the conference room.  The unique feature of iMeet is that each video feed appears in its own “cube” which glows green when that person is speaking.  This would be a really helpful option when large groups are meeting online.

Streaming historical recordings from the Library of Congress Jukebox

It’s often said that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”  The Library of Congress is helping us remember the past with a new tool that was recently released called the National Jukebox. At the National Jukebox, visitors can find streaming recordings of musical compositions, performances and speeches from the early 1900′s.  While some of the recordings sound a little scratchy, the amount and quality of  the content is honestly pretty amazing.  With over 10,000 recordings available in a free, searchable repository, the National Jukebox offers comedy recordings, plays and other content that can help our students take a journey to the past.  The site includes a disclaimer saying that some of the recordings  may contain offensive or inappropriate language.  While this may at first seem like a reason to avoid the site, I believe that most of the offensive content involves ethnic and racial stereotypes that isn’t acceptable in today’s society.  These recordings could be educational for some of our students and could help demonstrate how our society has changed over the last century.  It’s also educational to show how much our society hasn’t changed as well.  Poking through the repository, I found a recording from Woodrow Wilson where he discusses democratic principles.  Although the speech was from 1912, it’s moving to hear how Wilson’s words reflect our current national challenges.

The National Jukebox would be a great resource for educators who want to show historical events in context or want to highlight the earliest musical recordings and performances.  While some of the comedy routines offer language and content that may be difficult to hear in today’s society, they also provide a lens to view our nation’s journey towards racial equality.

The offspring of YouTube and Skype? Wetoku!

It sounds like the punch line for a middle school joke.  What would you get if you crossed YouTube and Skype?  The answer is a tremendous tool called Wetoku.  Like YouTube, Wetoku lets you create videos that stream online.  Like Skype, Wetoku allows you to conduct video interviews with people from around the world.  Putting this functionality of these two sites together makes Wetoku a unique and valuable tool.  The best part is the site is really easy to use and completely free.  The only challenge with the site is that both you and the person you are interviewing need to have Wetoku accounts before you can conduct an interview.  This is hardly a downside to such a powerful tool.

When I think about all of the educational options for this site, I’m honestly excited about educators using Wetoku with their students.  Students who are learning a foreign language can practice their speaking with a native speaker.  Students could conduct an interview with someone working in a profession they are researching.  The educational applications are almost limitless.  The great thing is that the interviews they conduct can be shared online and embedded in other places.  For those of us who build social experiences into our classes, we can have students individually record interviews on a specific topic but share their interviews with the rest of the class in a discussion board.

I do need to share a word of warning, however.  I would have serious reservations about using the site with younger students.  We need to be very cautious of putting vulnerable students in online interactions with strangers.  While Wetoku is a great tool to promote and record online interactions, it may not be appropriate to use with all learners.

Moving those binders online with ePortfolios

It’s the end of the semester on campus and I see loads of students lugging around three ring binders to submit as final projects in their classes.  When I see these students and their mass of accumulated documents, I’m confronted by two very competing thoughts.  On one hand, I’m impressed with the number of my colleagues who are embracing alternate forms of assessment with their students.  It’s great to see students be evaluated not just on their ability to cram for a final exam or cut and paste their way through a final paper.  With professional portfolios, students compile their best work from the semester and assemble their creations in some coherent fashion.  Students are assessed on their individual development and leave the class with something that can potentially be shared with employers.

On the other hand, however, I wonder whether the paper and binder portfolio is the best way to accomplish this task in the Web 2.0 world.  While I think the process of assembling the portfolio is extremely valuable, students are still creating a document that is primarily viewed by one person:  the educator.  In a world where social media rules the day, the paper and binder portfolio doesn’t leverage the global community at all.  In a world where a six year old can create a podcast that is heard around the world, how is the traditional binder helping to prepare our students to live and work in the 21st Century?  I thought I’d dedicate this post to several sites that could be easily used to create an ePortfolio.

Google Sites:

Sites is Google’s website hosting service.  It’s free.  It’s easy to use.  And it’s run by Google.  It also supports all sorts of multimedia so students could include their digital stories and other digital products in addition to their text-based documents.  My only hesitation to using Google Sites is that the finished ePortfolio looks like a website and not like a traditional portfolio.

Mixbook:

While it is primarily intended to be used as a memory book site, Mixbook would be a great site to use to create ePortfolios.  The site doesn’t support video or audio additions but the finished product looks like a book.  The pages flip like traditional pages and students will have a multitude of design options.  The great part is that the site is free if students are just creating electronic Mixbooks.  If students want to purchase a physical copy of their ePortfolio, however, Mixbook charges for that service.  While some may see that as a downside, it’s an option that few other ePortfolio sites offer which makes Mixbook stand out in my eyes. To learn more about Mixbook, be sure to check out the following tutorial:

Live Binders:

Live Binders bills itself as a three ring binder online.  The site is free to use and allows students to compile all sorts of multimedia from across the web.  In Live Binders, students can design their ePortfolio with different tabs just like they would in a traditional binder. To see an overview of the site, check out the video below.

Wikispaces:

While a wiki might not be the first tool that people think of when portfolios are discussed, Wikispaces would be a great site to host a portfolio (or even an entire class of portfolios).  Like Google Sites, Wikispaces is easy to use and free.  The site supports a variety of multimedia and can be used to assemble an interactive, online portfolio.  The downside, however, is that the finished product will look like a website which will only pose a problem for those hyper aesthetically minded educators out there.

Have some other ideas for sites that could be used for ePortfolios?  Be sure to use the blog space to comment your ideas.