By catch I mean that many of these sites cost a subscription fee, those that don’t usually require something or limit the duration of use or elements that are available. A great free example of what I mean is Dropbox, a very useful Cloud tool but also one that suffers from a small storage size unless you upgrade or invite friends and coworkers to expand the size of your storage. So far I’m happy to say that wiggio not only appears to be free of this restriction, but has so many of the tools and functions built into it – it may very well be THE solution I need for my curriculum’s group work.
The obstacles I wanted this tool to address was an easy way for the students to meet and share work on their project, but also give my instructor’s a way to keep tabs on who is contributing and doing what aspects of the project. Both of these are addressed in wiggio. Currently we use Dropbox for the students to share work and they usually use iChat to have their meetings with some of them using my courses Wimba classroom when it isn’t otherwise in use. This has worked somewhat, as the combination of these tools allows full collaboration. However it requires the students use at least two separate programs in order to get the difficult task of group work done in an online environment with the onus that there is no accountability or easy way for the instructor to track group work and contributions.
Wiggo has the abilities of Dropbox, iChat, and even some aspects of Wimba [archived group chat sessions] with the nice addition that the instructor can see who has contributed what files and when. This also helps the student group to stay on task, as there is even a calender feature that shows everyone when aspects of the work are due, when meetings are scheduled, and even can send out emails to the group reminding them of these tasks.
All and all Wiggo seems so far to be a great site for online group collaboration work – I highly suggest my peers give it a look!
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| This is the home screen each student would see - look at the organization tabs across the top! |
Great find, Lionel! I am signing up right after this post. I can think of several of my groups that could benefit from this site as well as my family. It amazes me that what seem so sophisticated can be FREE. Wiggio all the way!
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ReplyDeleteBP6-Lionel Jacques
ReplyDeleteLionel,
I am glad another person was able to see the wonderful application of this Web 2.0 tool. I found this one this month as well and am already implementing it on a few groups in my class sections as a way for them to be able to collaborate and file share more efficiently without them having to bounce between many different programs. So far, I am quite impressed with this tool and I do see this being used for the Computer Science and Internet class in the future. The biggest benefit that you mentioned was that it was free, which is a huge boon for the students since I know money can be tight for them. Your write up on Wiggio went into good detail one what the program is and what it has to offer instructors who might want to utilize this at a later date. In all, this is a great tool for those who do want to enhance collaboration, communication and file sharing as well as keeping it simple to use. A very good find, Lionel.