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April 15, 2002

Let's Meet Online: Collaboration Tools

By Kim Carter

Share lesson plans, enroll in an online course, or even conduct parent-teacher conferences from the comfort and convenience of your computer.

Anytime, anywhere collaboration is the order of the day, and schools are increasingly called upon to create online learning communities where teachers and parents can meet to discuss student grades, where educators can join in professional development discussions, and where remote learners can enroll in online courses. Given the wide range of functions they serve, it's no surprise that collaborative offerings vary widely, ranging from basic bulletin boards to full course platforms with chat, file sharing, and content delivery. The tools reviewed here capture this variety-from full-featured packages for large group interaction to project-based exercises designed for one-on-one collaboration.

The growing number of collaboration tools currently on the market indicates a new trend in Web-enabled communication technologies, as both schools and businesses are prompting providers to supply affordable ways to conduct meetings, deliver services, and collaborate efficiently. What we offer here, then, is a sampling of the range of tools available. All are Web-based, some exclusively, with differences appearing in localized uses of included software components. Some rely on client software on the desktop, while others run as Application Service Providers. Each mode of delivery offers its own advantages. For instance, client/server models like FirstClass run on your own server and require your own in-house tech support. ASP providers, such as LiveText, guarantee you full-time availability while managing hardware, administering the server, and providing firewall protection.

Regardless of delivery model, all of the tools here offer full security features, including passwords and permission settings. Additional considerations in selecting the best package for your school or district include available bandwidth, as variable connection speeds can impact ease of use; required plug-ins; and computer processing speeds, which may affect performance. We've organized these according to their complexity and cost, beginning with LiveText's entry-level teamwork tool and concluding with Polycom's WebOffice, the most powerful-and expensive-tool for facilitating online meetings.

LiveText Edu Solutions, Winter 2002 Edition (LiveText)

Simple and easy to use, LiveText is a Web-delivered subscription service for teachers featuring collaborative lesson-building activities. Educational organizations, such as school districts, universities, or organizations like the National Science Foundation, contract with the LiveText service. Teachers working for or affiliated with a participating school or organization then have access to all of LiveText's features, as well as teaching templates provided by those schools and organizations.

Unlike online course-delivery tools from WebCT and Blackboard, LiveText uses lesson planning as a focus for engaging the educational community. LiveText's service incorporates a variety of step-by-step templates for developing lesson plans based on a variety of teaching and learning models, from project-based learning to holistic portfolios. Many lessons and projects stored in LiveText's library correlate to state and national standards, and teachers can use Quick Aligner to build lesson plans around national standards, as well as standards from states contracting with the company. LiveText also automatically personalizes members' templates and log-in pages based on their educational affiliations and memberships.

LiveText's greatest strength lies in users' ability to control access to their documents. Once teachers create a lesson plan, project, course, or portfolio, they can select the "sharing" option, which lets colleagues review or adapt these materials using a real-time sticky note feature that saves to the original document. Teachers can also embed automatically scored quizzes, bulletin boards, and multimedia into their lessons.

Blackboard 5.5 (Blackboard)

Blackboard delivers course content and online instruction in a virtual school environment. Upon log-in, "My eSchool" greets users with a personalized school portal page that announces school-related activities and daily messages and gives access to online courses. Blackboard is a template-based application for building online courses, so teachers looking for a quick and easy way to build Web-based courses simply have to point, click, and type their syllabus, calendar, course description, and content materials into templates. Teachers will appreciate the My Tasks assignment planner that lets them enter assignments, descriptions, due dates, and indicate whether or not assignments have been completed.

Functionality is the heart of Blackboard's virtual classroom, which features a comprehensive array of work tools: an assessment engine for developing online quizzes and exams; communication tools, such as threaded discussions or bulletin boards; student tools, including a digital drop box for students to turn in assignments (even without e-mail); virtual classroom capability, allowing for real-time presentations and online discussions; and a template-driven graphical user interface that makes navigation intuitive and simple. Schools can also generate guest log-ins for visiting students or guest experts. And in an age when working parents can't always make an after-work parent-teacher conference, communication tools such as chat provide additional avenues for parent-teacher meetings. Administrators can also set up a class group specifically for parents to share questions with the teacher or with each other.

Partnerships with third-party software vendors promise to add increasing functionality to Blackboard's K-12 offering, giving users the option to embed other applications, develop assessment pools, and provide additional content. Blackboard To Go software allows for downloading content, assignments, and quizzes to handheld devices.

WebCT Campus Edition 3.6 (WebCT)

Like Blackboard, WebCT is a template-based online course building and collaboration system. In addition to e-mail and discussion boards, chat and whiteboard tools support a wide range of options for communication. Teachers can easily build syllabi, course calendars, and content modules with WebCT's easy-to-use templates, which follow a linear content delivery model with options to add content such as hyperlinks, video, and audio. Unlike Blackboard's static templates, however, advanced users can build their own customized courses or adapt WebCT's templates to accommodate their individual teaching methods and strategies.

Students will welcome the Resume Course function, which allows them to pick up exactly where they left off during their last visit to a virtual classroom. Course designers will enjoy customization options such as Selective Release, which delivers content to students either all at once, by date and time, by single or multiple names, by a specified column in the online grade book, or by student performance on a particular exam or assignment. Assessment tools can selectively release quiz questions or generate random questions for each student in a class. Additionally, teachers can opt to let students revise answers during testing using results from automatic scoring features (except for essay questions) or add explanatory comments or prompts for specific answers, thereby providing students with real-time feedback. Students with Web access can also monitor their grades and progress in a course.

FirstClass 6 Education Edition (Centrinity)

FirstClass is built upon the idea that everyone should have their own virtual office where they can conduct meetings, share documents, and easily make changes to work in progress from remote locations. With FirstClass Education Edition, teachers can create their own private virtual office that they can design to suit their needs and where students, parents, and administrators can all visit using a teacher's personal URL.

One of FirstClass's more exciting features is its ability to create and immediately update Web pages through simple e-mail forms. In fact, anything created in FirstClass can be dynamically rendered to the Web, putting Web management in the hands of end users without extensive training.

Using their personalized Web page as a communication hub, teachers can send messages to the principal, pick up student assignments, change homework tasks for that evening, or have students build their own Web pages. Built in to FirstClass functionality are exceptional information management tools that provide search and find capability for threaded discussions, e-mail, conferences, and folders by subject area, name, or discussion thread. E-mail messages can also be monitored for when they are read, forwarded, and replied to, providing access to communication pathways and verifying whether or not a student received a message or picked up his or her homework assignment.

Eminently scalable, FirstClass will run on a single server with one administrator for any number of users (in Denmark, 200,000 users work from one server), which makes it a great solution for district-wide collaboration. And while individuals can access their virtual office by entering their unique URL from any Internet browser, the client software option provides the best functionality.

WebOffice (Polycom)

A recognized name in the business world, Polycom has recently turned its eye toward the education market-and rightly so, given WebOffice's potential for distance learning and collaboration. Like FirstClass, WebOffice creates a virtual office environment for real-time meetings, and with the purchase of additional audio and video components, creates an experience that's almost like being there. Once assigned your own URL, fellow teachers, administrators, and parents can access your virtual office where they can chat, share just about any type of file, post messages, and work in real time on shared documents using a whiteboard.

With WebOffice, parents need only enter a teacher's URL to meet for a conference. If they have a question regarding a particular aspect of the student's work, the teacher could then pull up that student's documents for review or play back a video or audio clip of a student's presentation. An administrator could conduct a last-minute brainstorming session with teaching staff simply by asking them to log into his or her virtual office URL.

The teacher who calls the online conference or the administrator looking for feedback controls the flow of information and determines which documents will be shared and discussed. Online collaborators will also like WebOffice's indicator feature at the bottom of their screen that glows red when participants aren't viewing or working on a shared document and shines green when they are. In addition, WebOffice lets you remotely control group members' computers, an ideal tool for walking a team through the finer points of a document. While not included with basic service, the addition of audio and video tools optimizes WebOffice's unique spontaneous multipoint videoconferencing capabilities: just click, dial in, and begin your session.

Kim Carter is director of information services at Souhegan High School in Amherst, N.H.

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