Online Communication Tools
In a digital learning space, finding ways to connect and communicate deserves special consideration. Rather than in face-to-face interactions, online courses and remote workers need to find creative ways to stay connected.
Here are a few links with ideas on how to foster online communication:
Communication Technologies: Promoting Active Online Learners, EducationWorld, 2013
7 Online Communication Tools That Can Help You Collaborate in Your eLearning Teams, eLearning Industry, May 2017
Five Ways to Make Your Online Classrooms More Interactive, Faculty Focus, December 2016
My Favorite Tech Tools for Communication and Collaboration, The Techie Teacher, January 2017
Student-Professor Communication Improve Online Learning Outcomes, Villanova University, 2017
Two of my favorite online communication tools are:
Two tools that help with this are:
#1 - Asana
https://asana.com (Links to an external site.)
In my industry (non-profit and education), there are often many different projects happening at once, as well a mix of people working on things collaboratively. Asana, a workplace management dashboard, has been incredibly helpful for me & my team - especially since working from home due to the pandemic. Asana allows you to set up projects, and provide updates to those who need to know. You create a project, and list all the sub-tasks needed to complete it. From there, you can assign people to tasks, track, process, provide update, anticipate challenges, and otherwise collaborate on projects with others. You are able to use this tool within an entire company, or even with other organizations that also use the platform. It even has a mobile app, so I can update and keep on top of projects even while traveling between classrooms.
#2 - DropBox
https://www.dropbox.com (Links to an external site.)
DropBox is another tool that has been incredibly helpful in my work, and even more so with remote work. DropBox is a secure way to access and share files. It is somewhat similar to a shared Google Drive folder, but not attached to any one email provider. This comes in handy in my line of work, because I am often collaborating with people to work outside of my own organization - various school districts, or other community-based organizations. Since we do not all work for the same company, our work emails are hosted by a variety of platforms (outlook, google, etc). DockBox allows us to share materials with one another in an easy-to-access way for all.
