We are a new middle school team who met some really awesome people at Worlds last week. We arranged with a few other teams to collaborate long distance as we work on next year’s competition. Any recommendations out there on a good online format by which to do so while…
keeping kids safe
making sure adults can monitor adequately
file sharing
ability to video conference (maybe even share screen)
Google Drive! I have done a lot of collaboration with friends and with school teams using shared Google Docs. All that is required is a gmail account. It is easy to make the documents viewable and editable to mentors (It may be desirable for the mentors to have administrative rights and grant access to the appropriate team members). It allows file sharing, a descent amount of storage for free, and real time editing of a shared word or excel style document. There is a chat feature built in, although in general it is not the greatest. Combining it with skype or something similar for video conference might be worth while. (When working with class mates, we tended to have our meeting face to face, then work remotely on the same documents, and when working with friends, we would communicate via facebook messenger)
@Robo_Eng_13 That was my first inclination. I know we could use Hangouts for interactive conferncing. Just didn’t know if there might be other options as well. Nice to know that Google is a viable option. Thanks for sharing!
I have not used a better platform for real time collaboration on documents, however if you are more interested in file sharing, Dropbox is a generally good service, and GitHub can be valuable (with a learning curve) for version controlling code edits.
Consider using an email account that is not tied to any one person - maybe creating one just for talking to other teams - so that you can easily monitor all communication and to keep each student’s personal contact info out of the picture.
MS - maybe Edmodo - parents can supervise and email is not visible. Well monitors. Check terms of use to make sure they agree with your school’s IT policies.
we do a lot of texting, emailing, scheduling a full day of scrimmage with in-state teams, youtubing, and vex-foruming. On the email: we use a team email, add parents/coaches to the email, they have access to all messages, and assuming that the email stays focused on vex, there will be a lot of collaboration between coaches and teams, discussing all the ideas thrown around. Hope this helps!!
One suggestion I haven’t seen on here is Slack. It provides an easy way to set up communication and file sharing all in one place while also protecting emails and not requiring personal information. In addition, adults can easily be set up as admins for the group in order to monitor things. It does have private messaging, which would be hard to monitor, but that is a pitfall of almost any choice you make.
For video conferencing, so long as you only have 8 screens active at a time, appear.in is great. It is free for up to 8 screens at a time. You can share your screen with the group. The video and audio quality is good.