One thing that has stumped me in the last couple years is this. Someone emails me and says, “let’s have our schools do projects together.” It’s so broad and wide open and I have so many things going on already that I don’t have a good answer. It’s so much work to just begin to talk!
But, as the Jazz project has evolved, and GoogleDocs is changing my workflow, I have a new idea! Here’s how it’s working so far.
This week, a building coordinator from TX from the Jazz class last week, emailed me asking for 5 2nd grade teacher partners to do a communities project. Now instead of a flurry of emails and headaches coordinating, we’re going to use a GoogleDocs spreadsheet to coordinate the whole collaboration.
I started a spreadsheet with the following columns. (In fact I made myself a template that I can easily Save As… for the next collaboration that comes along.) I’m thinking that each row in the spreadsheet corresponds to one connection.
- Initiating Teacher
- School
- Phone
- Topic
- Suggested Date Range
- Suggested Times
- IP Address & dial direction
- Partner Teacher
- School
- Phone
- IP Address & dial direction
- Final Date
- Final Time
Then I added another sheet within the spreadsheet for the facilitators & coordinators contact info.
- Name
- Phone
- Cell Phone
- Position/Connection (i.e. building coordinator for X Elem., regional tech etc.)
So the next step will be for her to fill in the details of what her teachers want. Then I’ll fill in with my teachers, invite my building coordinators who get involved to share the spreadsheet, and off we go. I’m hoping this will make the whole process a lot smoother. I think it’s likely that we’ll use this format for follow-up for the Mini-Jazz workshops I have scheduled with Roxanne (TX) & Nurit (AB) for next year.
I can see this working well for my 6th grade Canada exchange project too. Last year I had 9 local classes connect to three different places in Canada. One spreadsheet shared with all the interested parties would have made this so much easier!
Do you see this process working well for you too? How do YOU handle multiple collaboration videoconferences between buildings/locations/regions?
Great timing for posting this. I actually was talking with my district coordinator who worked with us last year in Mini-Jazz about Google Docs this morning and told her that I would make a sample and invite her so she could see how it works.
I got busy with other things and by the time I got around to creating a sample for her, I was able to use the template and created one for her to use for her buildings. 🙂 We worked in the spreadsheet for a bit and used the chat feature. She loved it.
On to the next project…thanks for sharing!
What a GREAT idea!! Thanks for reminding me about the power of Google docs!!