No. 1—Bridge the Gap between Busy Teachers and
Tech-savvy Students
Every year students become
more tech savvy. And every year teachers struggle to keep up. It’s hard to take
time out of busy schedules to learn how to create a class Web page and keep it
up to date with a calendar of events, homework assignments, class projects,
useful links and other important information. E-mail is useful for many
interactions. However, teachers at every level need more effective ways to
provide students with the right information at the right time.
Fortunately, the latest
collaboration tools are far more natural to use than traditional Internet
technologies. These tools provide teachers with an effective way to bridge the
technology gap and embrace the kinds of tools their students already use. Class
workspaces are easy to set up, and they provide a single, easy-to-access place
to publish information on special events, homework assignments, and individual
and group projects. As a result, students can tap into this information at any
time—even when they are cramming for an exam at midnight or putting the final
touches on an end-of-term report on a Sunday afternoon.
Blogs
and wikis help teachers collaborate on lesson plans and help students develop
content for individual and group projects. Workspaces provide a central place
for collecting and reviewing assignments, monitoring progress on projects and
giving students feedback on their work. Calendars show when tests are
scheduled, when projects and assignments are due, and what topics are being
covered when. And unlike commercial social networking technology, all of these
tools can be configured with the content filtering and related controls
required by most educational institutions.
No. 2—Exchange Ideas and Share Best Practices
Finding just the right way to
present a complex topic, reach a student with special needs or solve other
educational challenges takes time and experience. Chances are, another teacher
has already taken the time and gained that experience. Unfortunately, teachers
are often limited in their ability to draw on each other’s expertise and
know-how.
Next-generation collaboration
tools promote the free exchange of ideas and sharing of best practices,
enabling educators to benefit from the knowledge and skills of others. Using
team workspaces, social networking tools and real-time conferencing
capabilities, college professors can seek out and collaborate with colleagues
at the same institution or at institutions around the world. They can also meet
with students online, one-on-one or as a group, to address specific topics,
special interests and student needs.
At primary and secondary
schools, teachers can communicate more easily with their peers at a given
school and across the district as a whole to resolve problems and gain insight
into effective teaching strategies. These tools also provide the foundation for
effective special interest workgroups and communities of practice that cross
subject and grade-level boundaries.
Students
benefit as well. They can use the same next-generation collaboration tools to
study online with their peers, jointly develop materials for a group project,
and locate content or expertise to enhance their own interests and work.
Teleconferencing and white boarding capabilities enable them to meet at any
time from the dorm, from home or from the local coffee house.
No. 3—Catch Up Absent or Struggling Students
It’s flu season. Six students
in your class have been out all week. They missed the entire module on the
Industrial Revolution of the late-nineteenth century. And, while the three
English-language learners in your class didn’t miss school, they are still
struggling to grasp the impact of this event on world socioeconomic conditions.
Catching up so many students
when illness or other factors cause them to get behind has always been a
challenge. If you put this responsibility on the parents, students might not
learn basic concepts that lay the foundation for more advanced learning. If you
use precious class time to go over these concepts again, you may not be able to
cover all the scheduled topics for the school year.
Fortunately,
a teaming and conferencing system has captured your classroom presentation each
day, including the whiteboard content. Absent and struggling students can view
it on a computer or download a podcast to play on an MP3 player. Using these
resources, they can catch up at home or during the after-school homework club.
No. 4—Onboard and Develop Employees
The new academic year starts
in two weeks. The number of new faculty members is overwhelming this year. All
of them need to be brought up to speed on policies, procedures, job
requirements and expectations. The faster you accomplish this, the faster they
can get on to the business of teaching.
Teaming and conferencing
capabilities make it easy for team members to ramp up to full productivity with
online orientation and training sessions. New people—from instructors and
visiting professors to the bookstore manager and campus security director—can
complete these sessions before their first day on the job. From day one, they
will know how to request equipment, get approvals for an outside speaker, fill
out time sheets and arrange for substitutes.
Behind the scenes, workflow
manages the appropriate forms through review cycles so that everyone has the
right equipment, supplies, badges, library cards, information access privileges
and other resources. In addition, it helps administrators ensure that new
people comply with requirements for health exams, fingerprinting,
certifications, first-aid training and so forth.
These tools can help new
people assimilate into the environment and culture much more quickly as well.
How? By connecting new people with experienced ones through blogs, forums,
myspace-style personal pages and other channels. Such connections incorporate
new people into the informal network and give them the opportunity to explore
teaching strategies, classroom management experiences and other topics that
help them excel.
Throughout
the academic year, you can leverage these same capabilities to support employee
development. Online training provides people with new knowledge and skills,
preparing them to climb the career ladder or step into new positions that
interest them. Again, workflow ensures that the right equipment and resources
are allocated before a job change occurs and that all certifications and other
requirements for the new job are in place.
No. 5—Meet (or Exceed) Performance Goals and
Standards
In many parts of the world,
mandates require schools to demonstrate their success in terms of student
performance. And the desire to increase performance—mandates aside—is a
hallmark of educational institutions worldwide. But many public school teachers
today feel they spend more time preparing students to perform adequately on
standardized tests than they spend on academic excellence. The pressure to
demonstrate compliance with educational standards has never been greater.
Next-generation collaboration
tools can help teachers deliver the best possible education by focusing on
three important questions:
What do our students need to
learn?
How do we know they are
learning it?
What action can we take when
they are not?
Through
blogs, wikis, forums and other collaboration tools, teachers can engage in
discussions about how to deliver the core curriculum most effectively. With
communication and conferencing tools, they can complement face-to-face faculty
collaboration sessions with ongoing virtual dialogue.
Instant messaging and
conferencing enable real-time communication to address not only academic
performance, but other time-sensitive issues like illness, injury, safety
threats, or weather conditions that affect student transportation. These
instant meeting capabilities enable the appropriate people to come together
quickly to take action. The result is faster intervention, enabling teachers to
keep students on track and performing optimally.
Next-generation collaboration
tools also make it easier for teachers to tailor classroom education to varying
levels of knowledge and ability—from special needs students to
non-native-language speakers to the highly gifted and talented. Teachers can
collaborate to refine and implement strategies. They can leverage conferencing
tools to provide opportunities for students to participate in accelerated class’s
not available onsite. For example, middle scholars can participate in a high
school math class online and high school students can learn a foreign language
through a local community college.
The
bottom line is that these next-generation collaboration tools keep the focus
where it should be: on learning and instruction. Thus, students perform well on
standardized tests because they have assimilated the required knowledge and
skills; not because they’ve been drilled repeatedly on how to take a test.
No. 6—Streamline and Standardize Document
Development
E-mail
has become a staple for communication among faculty, staff and students. But
the volume of messages has skyrocketed over the past decade, and many
educational institutions suffer from e-mail overload. Thousands of messages
clog up networks and inboxes, and important messages often become trapped in
spam filters, thus interrupting the communication flow.
Moreover, because e-mail is
such a convenient way to disseminate information, people rely on it to
distribute documents for review and editing. E-mail, however, wasn’t designed
for document management. Juggling document versions and ensuring that everyone
is working with the most up-to-date drafts is difficult, if not impossible.
Educators need new
collaboration tools that address the need for rapid creation of curriculum and
lesson plans, grant proposals, research reports, academic papers and articles,
conference presentations and more. They also need new tools for locating
helpful resource material, reviewing and editing documents, getting them
approved, organizing them and making sure they are readily available to the
right people.
Workspaces with file and wiki
folders provide an easy, efficient way to organize information on Web sites so
that people can author and edit documents—and keep track of different
versions—easily.
Blogs and forums allow people
to provide commentary and discuss issues and ideas as document development
occurs. Surveys provide a means of collecting and aggregating team ideas and
opinions. Instant messaging and conferencing tools enable real-time
communication to speed document creation and help the team meet critical
deadlines. And workflow capabilities automate review and approval processes,
ensuring that all stakeholders are in the loop and that approval cycles aren’t
stalled because someone didn’t receive an e-mail message.
Educational
institutions are already beginning to adopt these innovative tools to support
committees and teams developing content on accreditation, campus safety,
student government, institutional effectiveness, regulatory compliance and much
more.
No. 7—Extend the Value of Meetings
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A pre-eminent scholar in
astrophysics will be a guest lecturer at your university for three weeks during
the Fall term. For more than a year, a team of faculty and administrators has
been working to arrange class presentations, faculty mentoring and a public
reception. Informing everyone involved about relevant details hasn’t been easy.
But making the most of this scholar’s visit—and ensuring that every detail is
attended to—is well worth the effort.
Collaboration tools
facilitate the successful completion of projects such as making arrangements
for visiting faculty, preparing for reaccreditation or launching a master’s
program in a new field of study. Workspaces provide a central place for
developing plans and providing supporting material. Blogs, wikis, calendaring,
instant messaging, teleconferencing and white boarding help team members work
together without traveling to a central place for face-to-face meetings. These
same tools help the team disseminate information to keep other stakeholders up
to date.
Online meetings have the
potential to expand participation dramatically, engaging all stakeholders more
fully. Instructors and faculty typically have widely varying schedules and
often live some distance from the campus. Teachers of online classes may live
hundreds of miles away. Online meetings accommodate varying schedules and
geographic hurdles, allowing everyone to listen to discussions by phone, view
presentations on a computer, and submit questions and comments through a chat
window.
And
by capturing the entire meeting and making it available online after the
meeting is over, the educational institution can reach an even wider audience.
A university could record a compelling lecture given to faculty and share it
with graduate students. Or a local school district could record public
commentary on a proposed curriculum change and make the information available
to all teachers in member schools. In this way, more people can participate in
the information sharing process, and they can continue productive conversations
long after a meeting is over.
No. 8—Complement Online Learning
Education has always been
vital to career advancement, as well as a richer life. But hectic work
schedules, long commutes on traffic-laden freeways and limited parking often
make it difficult to pursue educational opportunities.
Effective distance or online
learning tools overcome these obstacles. Many schools have adopted Web-based
online course management software to distribute lesson materials and manage
progress, making it easier for students to have what they need from any place
with Internet access.
Team
workspaces complement these solutions by providing Web-based tools to help
students coordinate and collaborate. For example, students can use the
Web-based training system to download a course assignment and study it to
understand what research, study, writing or other work needs to be done. Then,
as they work on the assignment, they can share ideas and work in progress with
other students using file folders in the workspace.
As students do their research
and other work, they can post their ideas in wikis or blogs to share with their
peers. Other students can read these blogs and post comments. They can use a
threaded discussion folder to post lab findings, useful text references or
thoughts from professors or advisors. The result is that work is amplified,
allowing students to take their learning further than if they did the work
alone.
Students
can either use their personal workspaces to stage this sort of collaboration,
or create a new workspace for a particular assignment. A study group can create
a workspace to collaborate on assignments for the duration of the course. A
calendar and task folder can make coordination for such a workgroup much more
effective than the alternative of text and e-mail messages. And the dates and
action items for study group members can all be stored in a single location
where every member of the team can see them
No. 9—Support Student Activities
Academic achievement is the
primary focus of public education. At the same time, activities such as sports,
band and choir, art programs, school newspapers and yearbooks are an essential
part of a well-rounded education. So is participation in various clubs,
community service events, competitions, conferences and symposia.
Coordinating and publicizing
these extracurricular events has traditionally required a tremendous amount of
time, effort and paperwork. Next-generation collaboration tools enhance the
ability of administrators to coordinate busy calendars and disseminate schedules
of events and practices, travel itineraries, registration forms and other
materials to the widest possible audience.
With these tools, student
associations and administrators can make it easy for students to plan and
participate in a variety of programs, groups and clubs. For example, the math
honor society, soccer team or chess club can set up a workspace for maintaining
membership qualifications, member lists, calendars, club events, sign-up forms
and other relevant information. They can also use task folders to track action
items like booking the photographer for team pictures, providing content for
the school newspaper or submitting proposals for local fairs, competitions and
symposia.
Moreover,
when students are collaborating to develop papers and presentations for
conferences, create mock-trial scenarios or work on other team projects,
next-generation collaboration tools help them create a superior end product
that highlights their efforts, skills and knowledge.
No. 10—Go Green
Students of all ages, from
kindergarteners through doctoral candidates, are enthusiastically supporting
green initiatives that promote environmentally friendly lifestyles.
Next-generation collaboration fits right into the green philosophy.
Replacing paper-based
processes with online workflow and consolidating documents into easily
accessible workspaces slashes paper usage, not to mention photocopying time.
Instead of making dozens of copies of homework assignments, calendars and
classroom handouts, teachers can make all this information available through a
class workspace. By putting more information online, students can cut back on
trips to pick up assignment sheets and other class materials. And by replacing
face-to-face meetings with online collaboration, schools reduce fuel
consumption and vehicle exhaust emissions even further.
Next-generation collaboration
can even replicate one of the things people do love about paper: the
ability to annotate with it. With teaming and conferencing capabilities, it’s
easy to make edits to a document, add content to a wiki or post comments to a
blog. You can even use a shared whiteboard to brainstorm or jot down ideas
during an online meeting.
The
benefits of next-generation collaboration extend well beyond protecting the
planet. These innovative tools also cut the costs associated with paper
consumption and travel, which means educational institutions save time and
money while being good citizens.
