Module 4
Asynchronous Communication Tools
by Jerrod Pickering
October 06, 2008
| Google Documents | Blogs | Diigo | |
| Summary | Online Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Presentation Tool | Discussion board-style tool that allows users to post messages and others to post comments to that initial posts. | Social Bookmarking tool that allows you to tag websites, make comments, highlight portions of websites, and utilize a discussion board feature and then share them with others. |
| Benefactors | Anyone who travels or owns more than one computer or collaborates with others can use this tool. | Blogs have shown to be useful in almost every business, industry, and hobby. | Anyone who works collaboratively with others could benefit because it allows easy sharing of needed websites. As an individual it can be used to access your internet favorites anywhere in the world with web access. |
| Higher Order Thinking Skills | This collaborative tool promotes the creation of new files that will showcase student knowledge and creativity. | Students have to create new items of information. Other students have to analyze and evaluate others' responses. | Students can critically analyze websites and pull out important information utilizing the comment and highlighting tools |
| Advantages | Upload different files from various word processing programs. Uses a popular name (Google) | Easy to use, most of them do not have logins, subscribe through an RSS feed to receive email updates. Some blogs will integrate within your existing website. | Easy to use, very robust piece of software. It integrates directly into a web browser and keeps your logged in constantly. |
| Disadvantages | Sometimes it is difficult to copy formatting from different Microsoft Office products | Can get disorganized depending on the specific blogging tool used. | It is not a well known site. Delicious has already gained a lot of ground in the social bookmarking world. |
| Supporting Distance Education | This allows collaboration among class members without email changes to files. | When it comes time to critique others work or to publish weekly updates on classes. | It helps group websites by different tags and allows those websites to be easily shared with others. |
| Personal Reaction | Personally, I like Google Documents. It is a very powerfult tool. However, recently I came across another site similar to Google Documents called Zoho and it is even easier to use, it is just a harder name to remember. | Blogging is still a tool I do not use consistently because it can be a time intensive tool, but it can be used very effectively. | I have used Delicious the past few years, but I am now switching to Diigo because it has more features than Delicious. |
