Educational Technology - Module #5: Collaboration and Communication Tools

Module #5: Collaboration and Communication Tools

Collaboration tools is very important as it helps other people to collaborate. It is also important to support a group or two or more individuals to accomplish a common goals or objective. Meanwhile, Communication tools refers to three forms of electronic communication in distance education courses which consists e-mail, discussion groups, and chat rooms.  For the purposes of the lesson, collaboration and communication tools are the online tools that allow teachers and students to work together for the teaching and learning process. There is some example of collaboration tools that given in this module such as Blendspace, and for the communication tools is Blogspot and Skype.

Blendspace is an online tool through the education curriculum company TES.com. The goal of Blendspace is to enable teachers to “blend” multimedia seamlessly into the classroom in an efficient and effective way. There are benefits on using blendspace which is it can be used to flip the classroom and to save the vital classroom time for student interactions, engaging activities, or having students independently.

Blogger is a free publishing platform, while Blogspot is a free domain service provider. Blogspot have to be used with Blogger, but Blogger doesn't have to be used with Blogspot. However, both are designed to work together in providing free blogging experience for their users. Having a blog spot can make someone a better writer and can build a network.

According to Wikipedia, Skype is a telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smart watches via the Internet and to regular telephones. Skype additionally provides instant messaging services. Skype can also be use in schools especially in the classroom. There are creative ways to use Skype in the classroom which is by using it to collaborate with other classes.

In conclusion, collaboration and communication tools are very important. It gives us many advantages that can help us in many ways not to forget in education fields.