Online collaboration tools have changed the way students work together on group projects. Gone are the days of meeting in a library to work on a group project. These days you can create a project for free from any computer or mobile device and share it with your group members. Below I have highlighted some of the best online collaboration tools available for free, as well as some other helpful resources that will help save you time and money when working on your next project.
Content Curation Tools
To collaborate on an online course plan or a lesson, gathering and managing relevant info is a critical starting point. In classes, students can collect images for group art projects or share articles for research, thereby learning how to work with digital archives together. Either way, content curation tools will help you facilitate the collecting and sharing of textual and visual information. Their powers for collaboration in eLearning are clear, so let’s dive into them.
1. Padlet – Gather web content
Padlet is a digital bulletin board similar to well-known Pinterest but designed especially for collaboration. It’s like a wall or a notice board, where the entire class can allocate documents, links, video, and images online for further implementation. For example, you can collect important classroom files or have students gather resources for research. A powerful feedback tool will help you assess students’ work.
Cost: free version; $99 per user/year (Business); $2000/year (School).
2. Wakelet – Gather web content and bookmark everything
Wakelet is another curation tool, an alternative to Padlet. It is a digital bookmarking platform that allows you to collect multimedia resources in folders and manage them. With Wakelet, you can bookmark everything on the Internet, even tweets. Then you can put your content into off-the-shelf templates for lesson plans, group projects, research, assignments, etc., and embed this into an LMS.
Cost: free
3. Diigo – Gather web content, annotate, and share it
Diigo is a free bookmarking tool available as a browser extension or a mobile app. With Diigo, you can organize your personal library of any online resources, highlight them, and put sticky notes on them. Set up a Diigo group and share the resources you’ve found with colleagues or students, discuss them in attached comments, and start forum discussions.
Cost: free by default and for educators; other versions from $40/year.
4. Zotero – Gather sources for research and share them
Zotero is a free research software that helps you to collect research sources and papers from various sites, and store and share them all in one place. You can build a common research base or a collaborative bibliography list, collaborate on ongoing projects with colleagues in public or private Zotero groups, and discover people with similar interests with tagging and citations.
Cost: free
5. Symbaloo – Get your tiles in a row
Symbaloo is a homepage curation tool that organizes online resources, games, videos, and other files into tiles. To create a fun and engaging learning path, you can embed articles, videos, or quiz questions into a customizable pathway of tiles and share it with your students. To search for content curated by other educators, look in Symbaloo’s gallery. This will also help teachers to collaborate on curriculum mapping.
Cost: free version; pro versions start from $49/year.
Online Discussion Tools
Discussion tends to be a driver for student-centered learning. Teachers facilitate discussions to let students generate ideas, organize, and summarize them. Actually, getting students to talk and share ideas can be challenging, especially when it comes to remote learning. To make it easier, online tools with functions like visual brainstorming or short video responding are at your service. With their help, you can engage your shy students or those who resist participating in class.
6. ConceptBoard – Think together and draw on a whiteboard
ConceptBoard is a collaborative online whiteboard for representing ideas in visual flowcharts. Edit content together on a digital canvas, use screen share and video chat, and draw sketches to brainstorm ideas graphically. You can also attach sticky notes, drag-and-drop images, videos, PDFs, and other files on this whiteboard.
Cost: $6 per user/month (Premium). Free 30-day trial.
7. Creatly – Design and plan together
Creatly.com is a discussion board for collaborating on visual content: diagrams, charts, storyboards, design projects, etc. With Creately, you can share and edit lesson plans with colleagues or brainstorm a group project with students on an online canvas. The platform has a huge library of premade canvases, subject-specific templates, and embedded video conferencing functions.
Cost: $4.95/month (Personal), $6 per user/month (Team). 30-day money back guarantee.
8. Miro – Think, draw, and design on a whiteboard together
Miro is a free collaborative whiteboard platform that structures your team’s ideas visually. It’s like an infinite whiteboard with an easily understandable design where you can conduct brainstorming, mind mapping, and more, synchronously. For example, you can let students plan actions on a complex project here, or teach them to work in a more structured manner. Invite people to collaborate on a board easily and keep in touch with the built-in video, chat, and comments section.
Cost: free for personal use; $8 per user/month (team).
9. Flipgrid – Get video feedback from your students
Flipgrid is a free video learning platform where you can create grids – special places to allocate topics for discussion among your colleagues or students. They can respond and contribute to these topics with short videos. Employ it for debates, peer reviews, experiments, performances, and so on.
Cost: free
10. Nearpod – Make interesting lessons with online discussions
Nearpod is a free online platform for delivering interactive presentations and assessments. Find ready-made lessons and videos, create them in minutes, or upload materials from Google Slides, PowerPoint, or YouTube. To conduct an interactive discussion, you just click on any slide of your lesson, insert a topic on the slide, and when reaching it, learners can give textual, audio, or video responses instantly.
Cost: free (Silver); $120/year (Gold); $349/year (Platinum).
11. InsertLearning – Review texts together and complement them with multimedia
InsertLearning is a free Chrome extension for inserting learning everywhere you want it on the Internet. Add instructional content easily on any web page and enhance the student reading experience. For example, you can select a certain idea in a text online, insert a question or a supporting video to the highlighted paragraph, and ask students to discuss texts in an embedded chat.
Cost: free
Tools for Virtual Classroom Activities
What can you do if you strive to get online learners to interact with each other, but they only interact with their devices? You can take advantage of that! There are online collaboration tools that provide you with pre-made yet customizable templates for interactive assignments, games, and quizzes on any device. They will help you stimulate student activity in classes and boost social engagement while learning online.
12. Seesaw – Do interactive assignments and group projects
Seesaw is an app-based platform that allows students to work together on texts, PDFs, drawings, videos, and more. To initiate collaboration, you can add multimedia instructions to the lesson, assign certain activities to students and approve their responses with no stress. Students can keep a collaborative learning journal to share content with their peers and the teacher. Seesaw supports multi-language translation and will be fine for ESL students.
Cost: free version; $120/year (Seesaw for Schools).
13. Microsoft OneNote – Do assignments, work on files, and create interactive lessons
Microsoft OneNote is a cloud multimedia notebook for planning lessons with other teachers, sharing assignments with students, and conducting rich interactive courses and quizzes. You can do it all with sketches, handwriting, video, and audio recordings in well-arranged class notebooks and sync them all easily.
Cost: the app is free; the desktop version is included in the paid MS Office suite.
14. Kahoot! – Implement playful learning
Kahoot is a game-based learning platform with millions of funny multiple-choice quizzes or ‘kahoots.’ It is possible to take kahoots via video conferencing with a shared screen, while students answer kahoots on their devices. Kahoot provides easy integration with Microsoft Teams so you can work in groups with your students or edit quizzes with colleagues.
Cost: free (basic); €3/month (pro); €6/ month (premium); €9/ month (premium+).
15. Colltrain – Implement playful learning
Colltrain is an online collaborative tool that helps you move all in-class training activities online. Run your synchronous training course easily with premade activity types. Trainees will enjoy working in teams and playing live collaborative games like Play with letters, Play with Cards, Jigsaw, and Mix and Match.
Cost: $33/month (Standard); $54/month (Plus); 45-day free trial.
16. Buncee – Collaborate on smart and funny presentations
Buncee is a multimedia presentation tool that allows students, educators, and administrators to make smart and funny presentations. Use it with no effort to produce buncees – interactive presentations and courses for the virtual classroom. Engage students of all ages to make buncees to demonstrate their knowledge in a fun way.
Cost: $7/month (Premium); $10/month (Classroom Lite); free 30-day trial.
17. Pear Deck – Implement playful learning
Pear Deck is a web-based application for you to boost classroom collaboration with interactive assessment templates. Insert them in your lessons from Keynotes, PowerPoint or Google slides in a breeze. Write questions in the flexible templates provided, then see students responding in real time or asynchronously and give them rapid feedback online. Conduct the Pear Deck lesson and the video classroom session at the same time.
Cost: free (Basic); $150/year (Individual Premium).
Collaborative Authoring Tools
An authoring tool is a software for creating digital educational content (courses, video lectures, quizzes, etc.) and then sharing it with students via a learning management system or on the Web. While working on courses in teams, instructional designers need to exchange emails 100 times a day. No wonder they often find collaboration time consuming and messy! It’s much more convenient to have a common space for building, editing, and reviewing courses together. We’ve enlisted some authoring tools below that have strong collaborative potential.
18. iSpring Suite Max
iSpring Suite Max is a desktop software that allows you to develop online courses, quizzes, dialogue simulations, and screencasts in the familiar PowerPoint interface. It features iSpring Space where authors can store projects, collaborate on contents and design, and receive feedback and comments.
Cost: starting from $770 per author/year; free 30-day trial.
19. Articulate 360
Articulate 360 is a suite of nine interconnected products, with Storyline 360 as the flagship authoring tool for creating online slides that include voice-overs, video, and animation. For premium plan users, it supports sharing slides with your team and editing them together. Articulate Review 360 will be helpful if you need to collect feedback from various stakeholders and track comment history.
Cost: from $999/ year; free 60-day trial.
20. H5P
H5P is a free open-source plug-in for collaborating on interactive courses and other educational projects in web browsers. Here, you can create rich HTML5 content such as interactive videos, games, and flashcards. You can share the content you made with other contributors on popular platforms like WordPress, Moodle, or Drupal, and LMSs that support LTI.
Cost: free
21. Udutu
Udutu is a free web-based tool for building interactive courses in your browser. With its help, you can create different kinds of activities, including assessments, interactive modules, and branching scenarios. An unlimited number of course designers and SMEs can collaborate on the content in the designated workspaces in real time.
Cost: free
22. Lectora
Lectora Online is an online authoring tool for building interactive slides with quizzes. It supports course development with multiple authors and has built-in email and chat. With Lectora’s ReviewLink collaboration service, your team can review courses smoothly. It lets you assign users and permissions, check out other users’ versions of the content, add notes and comments in 7 languages.
Cost: $899/year (Silver Suite); $1,299/year (Gold Suite); $1,599/year (Platinum Suite).
23. Elucidat
Elucidat is a cloud-based authoring tool for building eLearning content most suitable for large organizations. It allows several authors (or departments) to contribute to the same project at the same time. Besides, big employers can produce online courses seamlessly thanks to team-level permissions, brand control, and a central asset library. You can designate a portion of content making to a particular department, so others can’t see what is irrelevant to them.
Cost: upon request
24. dominKnow
dominKnow is a cloud-based authoring platform for creating eLearning courses, games, infographics, knowledge bases, and more. It centralizes authoring processes for your team in one place while having role-based workspaces for different developer roles. Moreover, it has a central library for sharing and reusing content across projects.
Cost: $997/year (Solo); $1,497/year (Team); free 14-day trial.
25. Easygenerator
Easygenerator is an online drag-and-drop constructor for making online courses fast. It allows for unlimited co-authoring with ready-made templates and 10 types of questions. Easygenerator has a convenient feedback option, however, only Team or Enterprise plans allow for external review of the courses or assigning different roles within an organization.
Cost: €83/month (Pro); €413/month (Team); free 14-day trial.
26. zipBoard
zipBoard is a cloud-based review tool for issue tracking and collaboration on web content. When building or testing online courses, you might face some bugs or issues in operation, so zipBoard will help your team simultaneously decide how to fix them. It looks like an online whiteboard on top of your website where you can discuss ideas with various stakeholders and even with end users.
Cost: $49/month (Starter); $89/month (Team); free 15-day trial.
Other Tools for Collaborative Content Development
Apart from online courses, you may want to collaborate on multimedia training materials like an interactive book or a podcast. These tools can be helpful in this case.
27. Book Creator – Collaborate on interactive books
Book Creator is a digital tool and a Chrome extension for collaborating on interactive book projects. There are plenty of pre-designed templates with images, videos, and audio for any subject or grade level. With these, you can create interactive instruction manuals, research journals, and digital portfolios together with your colleagues. Or engage students to work on inspiring book projects in groups.
Cost: free (40 books); $10 per teacher/month (1,000 books).
28. Soundtrap Edu – Record lessons and podcasts together
Soundtrap Edu is an online cross-platform software that allows you to record audio for educational purposes. Here you can make a high-quality online course recording, readings to improve fluency or cold call templates, and more. In the Studio, you can invite students or instructors to collaborate on a podcast by recording it on separate tracks, then transcribe it and upload it to Spotify from the cloud.
Cost: from $8 to $14/month; free 1-month trial.
LMSs for Collaboration
When running online courses, collaboration, as well as the training process itself, will be more effective if conducted on a single platform – an LMS. Learning management systems are cloud-based software for storing and assigning online courses and training materials, managing learners, and giving grades. In terms of collaboration, LMSs can provide user-role management, discussion forums, embedded chats, liking and sharing, and more. Let’s consider them one by one.
29. iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn is a fast and easy cloud-based LMS to kick start your training. There you can upload and manage any learning materials and SCORM courses, enroll students in groups from any department, and assess their knowledge. With Zoom integration, you can host Zoom training sessions and chat simultaneously right in iSpring Learn. If a trainee has a question, they can communicate with a course author or an expert easily from the course menu itself.
Cost: starting from $2.82 per user/month; free 14-day trial.
30. 360Learning
360Learning is a cloud-based collaborative learning platform where any team member can create and improve courses. You can assign various roles to the project stakeholders and invite external users to review. The platform allows your learners to impact a training roadmap by sharing, upvoting, and commenting on their learning needs.
Cost: $8 per user/month.
31. Docebo
Docebo is a cloud-based LMS that lets you leverage informal and user-generated content in eLearning. It aims to make eLearning as engaging as social networks and implements this vision in its Discover, Coach & Share module. Here, trainees can find relevant courses, ask questions to SMEs, and communicate in interactive discussion boards. In channels, they can contribute to group knowledge or study content in topics posted by peers and experts.
Cost: upon request
32. Schoology
Schoology is a web-based LMS for K-12 schools and institutions of higher education. Its Groups feature lets you work on certain items with other teachers, have discussions on subjects, or create student clubs. Public Groups of Schoology facilitate knowledge contribution and meeting other educators in professional learning communities.
Cost: free for educators
10 of the Best Online Tools for Student Collaboration
With an intuitive, user-friendly interface designed by teachers for teachers, Edmodo operates as a communication portal for students, teachers, and parents. No more questions about assignments, quizzes, and grades. Edmodo creates a space where everyone can communicate confidently without the pressure of a group setting or the inconvenience of scheduling face-to-face conversations.
Rather than fighting the overwhelming popularity of video games, this app’s designers decided to use it to increase student participation in K-12 classrooms. Loosely based on popular role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, Classcraft “reframes student progress” by allowing students to create a personal avatar. Then, throughout the course of everyday class activities, students earn character upgrades through positive behaviors, regular attendance, academic achievement, and more.
Despite its potential pitfalls, social media is still a powerful tool for collaboration. But in a school setting, the open source platform of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can be distracting for students. With its familiar, interactive design, Yammer allows customized groups to share ideas, information, and feedback, making it an ideal communication tool for teachers, students, and parents.
For teachers looking to expand their students’ worldview and understanding, PenPal Schools might be the ticket. The global PenPal community, which consists of more than 15,000 educators in 150 countries, is ideal for project-based learning in a variety of subjects. With a focus on security and safety, program access is open only to verified teachers and students, and teachers maintain the ability to monitor all messages.
Part mind mapping tool, part PowerPoint, Popplet gives students a clear, concise way to compile multiple ideas on a single topic and share them with each other. From brainstorming for a writing project to visualizing relationships between newly discovered images and information, this cooperative application lets users record their thoughts from a tablet or computer and display them for the rest of the class to see.
With the tagline “Make Math Social,” this engaging app uses classroom interaction to enhance problem-solving skills. When presented with math problems, students use CueThink to select a strategy and display their work. The app also gives classmates the ability to share positive critique and feedback. As students learn to solve problems, they also gain the ability to communicate their thought process to others.
Minecraft is arguably one of the most popular video games in the world, and this academic version allows teachers to incorporate lessons into the open-world gaming environment. Minecraft Education Edition engages children in group exercises that, according to the game’s developers, “promote creativity, collaboration, and problem solving in an immersive environment where the only limit is your imagination.”
When it comes to exciting subject matter, most teachers will tell you that economics rarely tops the list. However, with web-based games that let students simulate real-world scenarios, Economics-Games.com weaves in a little friendly competition to make the subject come alive. Since there are no apps or software to download, students and teachers can access the games wherever there’s an internet connection.
This exciting educational tool puts the “active” in “interactive.” While GooseChase features an extensive game library that teachers can use to teach everything from physical education to basic grammar, the app also features scavenger hunt-style lessons that can also add an extra element of fun to field trips. As a bonus, GooseChase developers also incorporated staff training and professional development exercises.
By focusing on 3D design, Makers Empire gives students the opportunity to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in an online collaborative environment. The designers of Makers Empire began with a desire to encourage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning at the early stages of education. The popularity of this online tool suggests they accomplished their goal.
With so many online collaboration tools for students, it is helpful for classrooms to have interactive displays that can accommodate a wide array of apps and programs. Thanks to their software agnostic design, Clear Touch Interactive® panels do just that. Each panel features a crystal-clear, ultra HD picture, bundled software package, and intuitive multi-touch technology that encourage students to get actively involved with their education. To see a Clear Touch™ panels and software in action, schedule a Live Online Demo today.
These Free Applications can Enable a Tremendous Variety of Collaborative Teaching and Learning Interactions and Activities
The 2014 Gates Foundation report, Teachers Know Best: What Educators Want from Digital Instructional Tools, indicates that teachers want tools “supporting student collaboration and providing interactive experiences”. This doesn’t come as a big surprise since these types of tools are fun and engaging. They also support 21st century skills like collaboration, communication, and creativity.
You know what else teachers like? Good quality tools that are free! And why not? Funds are limited and free is totally affordable!
This week on EmergingEdTech, we’ve put together a listing of 20 top notch free tools that are being used in schools and classrooms to collaborate and interact on assignments, projects, and other active learning efforts. Many of these applications are totally free, while others have levels of functionality starting at free and then adding additional capabilities through paid options.
These tools deliver a wide array of functionality, from communication to collaborative document editing, whiteboards, and gaming, to full Learning Management System capabilities. There’s something here for everyone! Dig in and enjoy!
1. Twiddla (www.twiddla.com)
Twiddle provides a really easy to use collaborative online whiteboard. This “no setup web based meeting playground” is quick and easy – inviting others to collaborate by just hitting the green GO button to start a session and then use the Invite option. This app provides a great set of tools. You can easily add an image, web page, or document as a background to markup. There is a color palette tool, pen width tool, a shapes tool, and text can be inserted. There’s even a chat option built in.
2. Google Drive (drive.google.com)
Most of you are probably already familiar with Google Drive, which lets you share and collaboratively edit Google Docs with anyone else who has a Google account, for free. Sweet. Being able to collaboratively edit documents and worksheets opens up a world of possibilities for interactive classroom activities and projects.
3. Bubbl.us (that’s it …Bubbl.us)
This free tool* allows users to easily create bubble maps, that can be exported in various formats, saved (by exporting and re-importing them in an appropriate format), and yes … edited collaboratively. The use of bubble maps as a teaching tool has been a good practice for decades, but bringing it to a new level by enabling collaborative editing through an online tool is totally 21st century!
*The Basic plan lets you create, share, and collaboratively edit 3 Bubble Maps.
4. Edmodo (edmodo.com)
This multi-platform, device agnostic, kid-safe platform is perfect for active learning – share content, have a dialogue (in or out of the classroom), and even get parents involved! A rich set of features including collaboration-enabling functions like Learning Communities and Discussions have encouraged over 34 million teachers and students to adopt Edmodo, making it one of the most popular free education tools on the Web. Check out “10 Reasons Why Edmodo is an Excellent (and Hugely Popular) Digital Learning Platform” to learn more.
5. Yammer (yammer.com)
Yammer is a private social network. Work in groups, share files, co-edit content and more with their free Basic plan. Explore “5 Ways Yammer is Improving Communication, Connections, and Learning in our Schools” to learn more.
6. Skype (skype.com)
This popular, widely known platform provides for group meetings tools that can be particularly effective for remote participants to come together. For example, if you’re thinking about collaborating with a remote classroom, Skype can be huge asset in doing so. Skype is also great from bringing students who might be stuck at home due to illness or other situations into the classroom to join the class for a collaborative dialogue or other activity.
7. Vyew (vyew.com)
Vyew is a collaborative interactive white board. It’s come a long way since we first covered it on EmergingEdTech years ago. Not only can you create a collaborative whiteboard on line, you can upload images and document and write over them, have a discussion around them, and more. Check out the “What is Vyew” video on their home page to learn more. The free version only allows for a small set of users (10 real time participants), but that can work well if you set up a few separate groups. Larger groups of participants aren’t too expensive, starting at $10/mo.
8. Wikispaces (wikispaces.com)
Wikis provide an easy place to create a members-only web site where users can have discussions, share documents and so on. Wikispaces was built for education. They even have a special “classroom” tool that is focused on Collaborative Writing: Wikispaces Classroom.
9. Facebook (facebook.com)
Yeah, that’s right – Facebook. If you put up a group page specifically for your class, you get a place of you own to collaborate. Of course, this is only for kids over 13. There are a lot of teachers using Facebook. Check out Facebook Summit 2011, an Excellent Academic Use of the Popular Internet App to learn about one teacher’s fun project using Facebook.
10. Google Hangouts (www.google.com/hangouts)
Google Hangouts in becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Skype for bringing remote groups of people to together to communicate and collaborate. A couple advantages Google Hangouts has is the potential to have a Hangout recorded, and the fact that you are less likely to have the occasional availability issue that the free version of Skype can have. Combine Google Hangouts and Google Drive (or many of the other tools in this list) and you can collaboratively edit content while you’re “hanging out”!
11. Cacoo (cacoo.com)
Create flowcharts and diagrams online with real time collaboration. This a very useful tool in a wide variety of academic disciplines, and being able to collaboratively edit them makes Cacoo a powerful application. Here’s a link to learn about and access their free Academic plan: https://cacoo.com/lang/en/academic.
12. Titanpad (titanpad.com)
What about collaboration on the iPad? Well, a number of the tools in this listing will work fine on many platforms, but Titanpad is geared specifically towards the iPad. TitanPad lets people work on one document simultaneously, and you can get a space for your team on your own private subdomain for free.
13. HaikuLearning (www.haikulearning.com)
Haiku is a popular education site, and it’s free for teachers – the solo plan includes 5 classes with up to 2GB of storage (with the ability to upgrade for a fee if you need more). This cloud-based app provides content sharing, assignments, feedback, grading, and more. Somewhat along the lines of Edmodo, Haiku is a basic Learning Management System that provides rich tools for the classroom.
14. Twitter (twitter.com)
Just search out a unique hashtag and you’re in business. Using a hashtag and a tool like Tweetdeck (also free), where you can dedicate a column to a specific search phrase (your hashtag in this case) and bam!, you’ve got a live stream of all content posted with that hashtag. Collect and share research or news, create a class poem or story (one student posts to the hashtag at a time, taking turns to build out the content), search out subject matter experts and follow them, and so on. Here’s 100 Ways to Teach With Twitter.
15. Minecraft (minecraftedu.com)
Multiplayer games can be a great way to provide an interactive, collaborative experience in the classroom. With a little know-how, Minecraft players can interact. Read this article to learn more about teaching using Minecraft: Gamifying the Classroom with Minecraft – the Possibilities are Powerful and Endless!
16. Economics-games (economics-games.com)
Here we have a purpose-built multiplayer game for the classroom. Economics-games.com is a free educational games site for teaching microeconomics, industrial organization and game theory. “Choose the game you want to run, enter the number of players and that’s it: You just have to communicate their logins to your students and have them connect to the site with their phones, tablets or laptops. You can then observe and debrief the game through your interface.”
17. World of Warcraft (wowinschool.pbworks.com)
Check this site out to learn all about using World of Warcraft and other “MMPORGs” (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in the classroom. Through this site, all project materials, including a fully-developed language arts course, aligned to middle grades standards, are now available under a creative commons license.
18. Bounceapp (www.bounceapp.com)
Review, notate, share, and discuss any web page with Bounceapp. Bounceapp makes it really easy to grab a web page screen shot and make notes on it. This can then be sent to others. User can share ideas on the same site by each grabbing, notating, and then sharing their work. For a more collaborative experience, Bounce will work with Notableapp.com to let a workgroup collaborate (Notableapp is not free, but there is a free 30 day trial).
19. Wiggio (wiggio.com)
Wiggio is a free workgroup application that provides meetings, to-do lists, messaging, calendars, polls, and file sharing. This is a fully blown collaboration environment, and it’s free (there is a premium service, but this is really only for organizations looking for a branded workspace and priority support – the primary functionality of Wiggio is totally free).
20. SocialFolders.me (socialfolders.me)
This is a bit of a stretch as a collaborative tool, but it’s a cool app and it could provide for a unique twist on the idea of collaboration. If you are using any of the apps supported by SocialFolders, say, Facebook and Instagram, for group work in a course, Social Folders can provide the ability to allow members of the workgroup to synch selected shared content, making it a sort of collection or gathering place for group content. Besides that, it’s a cool app that anyone who uses more than one social media application may find pretty darn useful (coordinate your content across multiple social media apps and back it up at the same time)!
This rich set of free tools can provide an endless array of collaborative, interactive class work for years to come. Happy collaborating everyone!
Conclusion
One of the best things about technology is that it allows you to connect with other like-minded individuals. By collaborating with others, you can turn ideas into action much faster, and create applications when you’re not sure how to solve a problem.