Pegby - free online notes, tasks, organizing, mindmapping, outlining and more

Pegby is an interesting site that lets you get materials and information organized online and even work with others on it.

You create Boards that allow you to work online, collaborating with others or just organizing things for yourself. Each Board can have columns to help you organize the Cards in each Board. The card is a kind of post it note that you title and add descriptions to. The Cards go in Columns on the Board. You can even Stack Cards on top of each other to organize them together. You can also Tag and Filter your Boards to make it easier to work with.

It's a great way to organize notes, tasks, and other information. It's also a great way to organize your thoughts (mindmapping) and you can use it to outline research and papers.

This is a very useful tool for educators and students to use.


Check it out and share it with your students and colleagues: https://www.pegby.com/home/view

Quickoffice Launches Connect cloud collaboration service

Quickoffice is an app for iOS, Android, and other mobile OS's that allows you to view, edit, and create Microsoft Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) on your mobile device. It's one of the apps I use quite often to access and create files for school.

Quickoffice has launched Connect, a cloud service that syncs documents between your Android, iOS, Macs and PCs. It allows you to search for documents on any connected device as if they were on the device you are working on. You can also add any folder on a PC or Mac to Connect. The folder can be synced, shared, and commented. This commenting makes it easy to collaborate on projects with others.

You can also access files from other online services, like Dropbox, Box.net, Google Docs, SugarSync, Evernote, and more with Connect. This means that all your files that you have on these services is available for editing and collaborating through Connect.


There are three levels of Connect available:
Basic (free) – view documents, cloud access, five sharable folders, sync up to two devices, 5,000 file sync capacity
Premium ($44.99/year) – view and edit documents, integrated search across devices/clouds, unlimited folder sharing, sync up to four devices, remote access, 125,000 file sync capacity
Professional ($69.99/year) – view and edit documents. integrated search, unlimited folder sharing, sync up to six devices, remote access, file versioning, 250,000 file sync capacity.

This is another great resource for students and educators, allowing them to work on files on their mobile devices, as well as collaborate on projects.


Related:

QuickOffice - essential app for mobile devices

Android for Education - Resources, tips, ideas, app reviews, and more. 

World Backup Day - make sure your data and files are backed up!

Hojoki - make all your cloud apps work together - very cool & free

Hojoki is a new service I just learned about from the Hojoki team. It's a very cool idea - it takes all of your online productivity apps and turns them into a newsfeed and collaborative space to work on projects.

I played with it a little today and will be using it more this week. It looks like something that could be very useful for education.

It' is in Beta now and free and there will always be a free plan available.

Here's more information and a video about it:

Teachers utilizing the cloud: Hojoki is your collaborative newsfeed for Google Docs, Calendar, Dropbox, Evernote and more

Hojoki’s basic idea is very simple: they offer one newsfeed for productivity apps. It connects to apps like Google Documents, Evernote, Dropbox, Mendeley and Google Calendar, building you a newsfeed and a collaborative space for your work.

Anytime an activity in any of your connected apps occurs, Hojoki informs you. You can share your activities with others in workspaces, where you can discuss events and manage whatever projects you’re working on. You never miss important changes from co-workers and have all your content in one place.





Why this is so interesting for Teachers?
Some of the tools Hojoki integrates are very powerful and established tools for education:

Google Documents for classroom collaboration
Google Calendar to share calendars with colleagues and classes
Dropbox for sharing and syncing files
Evernote with lot’s of uses prior, during and after class
If you and your colleagues use more than one of those tools, you know the problem. It’s almost impossible to manage communication and collaboration across all the apps efficiently. So both teachers and students spend a lot of time logging into lots of tools, checking for updates and informing each other on changes and updates.

Hojoki solves that fragmentation problem as it brings all the tools and all people involved in one browser tab and allows the creation of workspaces for collaboration.


How to use Hojoki in Education

Hojoki brings teachers and students and, most importantly, their tools together on one page. Here are three suggestions from the Hojoki team for educational use:

Creating and sharing teaching materials    
When creating and sharing teaching materials, teachers often use Google Docs, Dropbox and Evernote. As long as everyone is using the same app, everything is fine. But as soon as content spreads across apps, things become confusing. Everyone needs to log in, check frequently for changes and give feedback on other channels, like email. With Hojoki, you can connect all relevant content from lots of apps to a workspace to get instantly notified if someone updated or added something. Besides that, you get a full searchable history of changes in your teaching materials. Here’s an infographic that shows a typical workflow in Hojoki: http://blog.hojoki.com/post/20002424193/teaching-in-the-cloud-infographic


Online Classrooms
If you share and update content from Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs on a regular basis for a class, create a workspace with your students in Hojoki and add the relevant content. By doing this, Hojoki shows every activity as a newsfeed - who updated a document in Google Docs, created a note in Evernote or uploaded a file to Dropbox. Hojoki connects even to Google Calendar to view class events. Everyone in the classroom workspace can comment immediately and discuss issues. Hojoki saves time by making it easy and keeps everything in one place, so over time you get a fully searchable knowledge base on top of your tools.

Supervision
Workspaces also work great to provide supervision on writing and student projects which utilize more than one cloud app. Teachers can keep informed on the progress of either one student or a group of students. Students get instant feedback and guidance from their teachers and that extra boost in motivation. ;)



Hojoki www.hojoki.com is free, so give it a try!  http://hojoki.com/  

CollateBox - tool for data collection, sharing, collaboration

CollateBox is a new service, still in Beta by invitation, that promises a new way to collect, share, and collaborate with data online. It is supposed to be better, more secure, easier to use, and have more features for using data than Lotus, Excel or Google Docs.

It is still in Beta by invite only, so if you are interested, hurry and get your invite on their site.

Dropmark - free collaborative sharing and presentation tool

Dropmark is a free (fee based accounts available for more storage) collaborative sharing web app that allows you to also create presentations from files and from web content. File sharing is done through a simple drag-and-drop interface. It also allows you to create presentations and slideshows as well as collaborate on them with others.

You upload your files and then you can share them. You can also use the photos in a slideshow or presentation and add video and web sites. You can also add music from YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud.

Free accounts are 250 MB. 25GB costs $48 per year.

Source: Lifehacker

Related:

Popplet - online presentation, mindmapping, and bulletin board

mybrainshark - online video presentations

Knovio - create online presentations easily

Sliderocket - online presentation software

Prezi - the zooming presentation editor

Jux - a new way to present material

Qwiki - search results as a multimedia presentation

Google Docs Presentation 

Present me - easy way to record and share presentations

Podio - social work platform - great for education too

Podio is a "social work platform" that allows people to collaborate on projects. The service has already made apps for managing projects, and also provides an easy way to create your own project management apps. It also integrates with Google Docs. You create dedicated work spaces to work on projects and assignments. There are also iPhone and Android apps for Podio.

There's a free student version (https://students.podio.com/) and there are free accounts for anyone.

Some of the features:

• Project Management

  Discover the easy way to run projects. Simple yet fully flexible. Enjoy successfully finished projects.

• Social Intranet

  Share knowledge, see what others are working on, and connect to your co-workers to become a great team.

• Collaboration

  Discover the new way of collaborating across teams and organizations. Work smarter together and create more value

• Product Development

  Boost your development process. Stay on top of customizable workflows. Leverage team power to create great products.

• CRM & Lead Management

  Stay on top of all your business relations. Fully customizable to close more deals and know your customers better.

• Recruiting

  Manage your recruiting process in one place. Get out of spreadsheets and email and enjoy hiring the best candidates.

• Event Management

  All you need to organize great events. Easily keep track of budgets, participants and your team's tasks.

Some of the features of the student version:

6 reasons you'll love to use Podio

• Task Manager

  Hit 'T' anywhere in Podio to create a task. It's as easy as that to create your to-do list

• Simple Surveys

  Easily create survey apps, turn them into powerful web forms and collect your research hassle-free

• Files

  Share all your documents and files in one place, so you can comment and work on them - unlimited storage included

• Workspaces

  Create as many workspaces as you need to work together with your study group, research fellows, or your entire class

• Social

  Think of Facebook just for your professional study and work-related needs

• Mobile

  Use our free mobile apps to easily create new study notes and stay on top of your essays & uni projects on the go
  
  
  
  
  
  

Ten Sites Supporting Digital Classroom Collaboration - great article

Michael Gorman has a great article on his  21 st Century Educational Technology and Learning blog entitled "Ten Sites Supporting Digital Classroom Collaboration In Project Based Learning".

The article lists 10 sites that allow for students to collaborate on projects together with a short description of the site and how you can use it with your students. 

I'm a huge fan and user of Project Based Learning and this is a great list of resources to use with students.

Related:

Project Based Learning Resources

CorkBoard Me - online sticky notes web app

CorkBoard Me is a free web app that allows you to create a virtual cork board with sticky notes. You can create your own cork board without a login and share the unique URL with others. There is no space limitation and you can organize your notes on the cork board in any way you want. You can even add images to your cork board by pasting the link to the image and you can easily add notes to the image.

Your cork board is accessible from any web enabled device and mobile device support is coming. They are also working on licensing, privacy and custom boards which might be useful for schools and districts.

Students and teachers could use this to share notes, collaborate on projects, and much more. The notes can be rearranged as needed and could be used for story boarding, programming layouts and more.

Wiggio - work with groups online for free

Wiggio is a free site that allows you to work with groups online. You can create a group for your class, for your team of educators, or even your whole school. The site allows you to have shared calendars, send email, text and voice messages, create to-do lists and assign tasks, create polls, upload and share files, and host virtual meetings and conference calls.

This would be great for teachers and schools to use for class and group work and collaboration.

There is also an iPhone app.

Crocodoc.com

Crocodoc is a free, online service that allows you to upload and markup documents, including PDF files. You can not actually edit the PDF file, but can add text, highlight, draw, and even strikeout text. When you strikeout text, it opens a new text box above the strikeout for you to edit.

I used it recently to make a change to a physics lab I use with my students. It is a PDF file and I just wanted to make some small changes to the procedure. I uploaded the file, make the markups, and downloaded it. No account is necessary.

You can create an account and store files on the system. It even allows multiple people to markup and collaborate on work. Crocodoc works with PDF files, Word Documents, images, and PowerPoint presentations. You can view and mark up your files online. The documents can be shared with others who can all mark the files up collaboratively. You can make revisions, highlight or strikeout text, add notes and comments. Files are stored on their servers and can be password protected.

This is a great tool for educators and students to use for sharing work, working collaboratively, and providing feedback on work.

Board800 - web based Interactive Whiteboard

Board800 is a free, web based interactive white board that can be used by multiple users at the same time.

It is very easy to use and you can save your session. Tools include shapes, free drawing, and text. Your session can be saved as an image for later retrieval, archiving, or to embed in a document or web site.

This would be great for distance meetings, distance learning, tutoring, homework help, and much more.

You can also purchase a server version to host yourself for a fee.

Scribblar - online whiteboard - UPDATED

(originally posted 10/11/09)

Scribblar is an online meeting room / white board. Students can use it to collaborate on projects, teachers can tutor via the computer, and teachers can use it for collaborative meetings and projects.

Scribblar gives the users a virtual white board on the screen and writing tools to create text, lines and shapes. They can even add images.

There is also a chat window on the side bar so that users can talk to each other while working. There is even a live chat system if you have a microphone and speakers.

I see students using this to work on homework problems together. Teachers could use this to help students with homework after school or on the weekends.

Dweeber is another resource that has some similar functionality for students.

UPDATE: Scribblar can now support PDF files. Free users can upload PDFs with up to 5 pages. Your uploaded PDF will be turned into an editable image in Scribblar. Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for the tip!

Homework Social Network Site

Dweeber is a social network site for homework. Students can join for free and then have virtual study groups. They can use the white board to work out problems and collaborate on homework.

It has some nice features that can help students learn about their own learning styles and improve their performance in school.

For more information, see the article at Tech&Learning magazine.