PODIO

As I read Palmer’s (2007, p. 77) paradox of bounded and open educational space, I could almost hear the excitement in his words. Especially when describing how open spaces leads us to the many different paths of discovery (p. 77). Collaboration in itself is a path of discovery, but when combined with online tools this path takes on a variant spectrum within this path of discovery. One such tool is PODIO (https://podio.com/). This is a very organic tool that permits groups to communicate and share ideas by integrating many cloud accounts (such as DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, ect.). This tool can be used for simple class projects to complex business department or organizational wide projects. By allowing you to assign task to each member and visually gauging the progress on each individual task and the project as a whole, this tool can help the team be more proactive by ensuring that bottle necks won’t be a problem later due to procrastination. The fact that each group member can customize their “workspace” to suit their productivity and learning needs is also an added bonus. The ability to easily meet with your team through instant messaging, chat rooms, or video chat rooms and then tracking each meeting’s decisions and dialog through GoToMeeting can help recalling and searching important topics. PODIO also has the added benefit of permitting the team to share all of its work with a third party, thus allowing them to get an independent party’s suggestions, advice, or even approval. The only drawbacks to this tool are: 1. to access all of the wonderful benefits there is a cost involved per member, 2. although the tool can be used with mobile devices, it is more efficient (and therefore clearly meant) for a desktop, and 3. it requires a high level of technical skills, which could limit your user’s ability to navigate and be efficient.

References

Palmer, P. J. (2007). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life (10th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass.