4.5 Technology assisted school counselor and principal collaboration  (Page 5/16)

Electronic collaboration tools

To better conceptualize the wide ranging potentials for how technology can help school counselors, Sabella (2003) provided a useful categorization scheme which can help readers manage how they think about and implement technology, in this case, for collaboration. Technology can help educators in one or more of four areas:

1. Information/Resource : In the form of words, graphics, video, and even three-dimensional virtual environments, the online environment remains a dynamic and rapidly growing library of information and knowledge. Information is relational in that one piece of information may be linked to other pieces of information by the author. Or, more recently, computer systems have designed algorithms to help automatically generate links to information that is deemed related to the information you are currently accessing. Counselors and administrators can co-create and/or point to information that takes advantage of their unique perspectives.

2. Communication/Collaboration : Chat rooms, bulletin boards, virtual classroom environments, video conferencing, webinars, electronic meeting services, e-mail, social networking, application sharing – the web is now a place where people routinely connect, exchange information, and make shared decisions.

3. Interactive/Productivity Tools : The maturing of software and web-based programming has launched a new level of technological tools which has seemingly come off the shelves and landed on the Internet (also known as “cloud computing”). These high-tech tools can help counselors and administrators create anything ranging from a personalized business card to a set of personalized website links. Interactive tools available online can, for example, help school counselors and principals to process data and manipulate information (e.g. calculating a GPA or differences in student performance over time), convert text to speech, create a graph, or maintain a shared to-do list.

4. Delivery of Services : Although relatively still in its infancy, yet growing in popularity, is how educators use the web to “meet” with students, deliver lessons, or provide guidance and counseling services in an online or “virtual” environment.

Below, we focus on the first three of these four categories which are most applicable to school counselor and administrator collaboration.

Information/resource

Sharing information and resources is really what the Internet was designed to do and today, this endeavor remains its specialty. This vast network allows people to now share, not only text and links, but a dizzying array of multimedia that includes video, audio, photos, charts, and more. Anyone with a web-enabled device or computer can contribute to the universe of knowledge. The shift from institution generated knowledge to individually generated knowledge has proliferated to the degree that we now consider the web to have entered its first major upgrade – Web 2.0 – described as:

"The term "Web 2.0" is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with each other as contributors to the website's content, in contrast to websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web." (Web 2.0, 2010)