Educators have a need to collaborate, especially when they work in different locations. My Assistant Principal Amy and I are responsible for two school buildings and we are still experimenting with different collaborative technology options for ourselves. Here are some options if you have the same need:
Many schools are G Suite for Education members (formally known as Google Apps for Education), so G Docs are an obvious choice. Amy and I keep a running Google Doc going for each week and we use different colored text to represent each different writer. We can easily insert links to other G Docs and of course, the doc can be kept private. The iOS or Android app is splendid too.
Also, Google has just released “Team Drives”, a special environment for collaboration. This tool’s main advantage is that when team members leave the team, the rest of the drive is unaffected.
While naturally thought of as a tool for student and teacher, Google Classroom can be used as a collaboration tool for adults as well.
Edmodo was Google Classroom before the tech behemoth took the idea. Edmodo looks much like Facebook and has been a collaborative tool for classrooms as well as groups of educators for years.
This app is clearly the top choice for those not in education and the free version is surprisingly robust. Slack’s advantage is the messaging capabilities.
Evernote is my app of choice for archiving documents, thoughts, plans…nearly everything. But it’s not as well known as a collaborative tool. The app’s chat feature combined with its ability to share notebooks make it a perfectly adequate tool for collaboration, especially if all collaborators are consistent Evernote users.
Trello is unique in that it features “cards” that can be moved around to “boards” designed for various projects.
Clearly, this is not a full featured app, but to share large documents, there is no better choice.
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