4.5 Technology assisted school counselor and principal collaboration  (Page 13/16)

Microsoft Office Web Apps ( http://www.live.com ) has recently made available "Office Web Apps" which includes online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Zoho ( http://www.zoho.com/ ). Similar to Google docs, Zoho is another popular suite of online collaboration tools. Most of Zoho's products are free or offered at a fraction of the cost of other similar products.

Sometimes, you don’t need a full collaboration suite because you simply want to get a group of people to pool their knowledge and create documents in the form of hyperlinked web pages. You probably want to create a wiki. A Wiki is a type of website that allows a group of people to add, remove, and sometimes edit the available content. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring such as with handbooks, group project reports, presentation handouts, etc.

Wikis are often used to create collaborative web sites and to power community web sites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Common wiki platforms, especially among educators, includes:

• Wikidot . Publish content, share your documents, collaborate with friends or coworkers, create a place for your community. http://www.wikidot.com/
• Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
• wikispaces , similar to the others, allows users to create simple web pages that groups, friends,&families can edit together. http://www.wikispaces.com/

Collecting data

Getting feedback from others, conducting program or student assessment, and, in general, collecting information is part of a group process that is vital to effective group decision making, monitoring progress, and being accountable. Technology has made data collection incredibly easy and fast.

Polling . One counselor, Theresa, described how she is able to use the voting feature of her e-mail program to gain consensus on a particular purchase (Sabella&Stanley, 2008). She wrote:

"I had never used [Microsoft] Outlook in this fashion but I thought it might be useful. In one instance, I had a video tape called Bud and Dud on loan for a month from the company. Bud and Dud was a video series in which a dog gave tips for taking tests to students via 5-minute clips show during the morning announcements. The deadline for making a decision was quickly approaching and our school budget, like many, was very tight. We needed to decide if we should buy the program or send it back. Many of the students and teachers seemed to love it but one person was outspokenly against it. I wasn't sure if we should buy it because it was a “talking-dog-thing and seemed a little corny” – but I didn't want make the decision without more concrete feedback. So, I used the Microsoft Outlook voting feature which allows the user to send a survey-type messages with voting buttons to a group of recipients. By clicking a button, each respondent can express a preference and generate a response message to vote. Outlook logs vote messages to the original message's tracking page (visit http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=197420 for more details). The results were impressive. Over 95% of the respondents were in favor of purchasing and using the film. The principal saw the data and decided to purchase the program. The students and staff loved it and ask for it each and every year. Interestingly, the person that was originally against purchasing the program later told me that her students took a surprising liking to it. The Microsoft Outlook voting process was a simple feature that summarized the data in a matter of seconds. What would have required several hours otherwise only took seconds with this technology, a true positive impact on my productivity."