How to host a meeting from your computer

During the frenzied end of the year activities, there can be a lot on your plate, but you still need to get everyone together to make decisions. What's the best way to get the team together without trying to find a miracle hour where everyone is available? I found this great tool through my class's e-book called Padlet. This is a free online tool available here.  If you use some of the advanced tools or want to do frequent bulletin boards, you will need to choose the subscription service.

What does this tool do?  It is an online bulletin board that can be shared with other users.  This creates an online collaboration space that users can post and edit different items all from one spot.  Users can visit it when they have time and add items or edit them.

What's great about this tool is how intuitive the set up is and how easy it is for other user's to share it.  You could post excel graphs, spreadsheets, word files, videos, and even do doodles right in the program.  This tool is even a great place to use to organize all of your own thoughts on a project into one single location with the ability to switch between files quickly.  

So the next time you are playing the "when can we actually have this meeting?" game, I suggest you give this easy tool a try.  There is password protection available, or you can make the board able to be viewed by the public.  IF you are working on a group project in class, start with setting up a padlet and allow the other members of the group to post items as they finish so everyone's progress can be viewed real time.

This is a fun tool with lots of possibilities.  Please give it a try!  

Tell me how you really feel!

This week I would love to share a great new tool I was shown how to use during one of my college classes.  I am very excited to show a survey from Survey Monkey!  This is a great tool that uses all kinds of social media to gather responses.

Evaluation, prior to, during, or after a process is so important.  Last semester I took Evaluating training and one of the key things we looked at was sometimes anonymous surveys are important.  While making an anonymous web based survey used to require the employ of a computer programmer, now you can use the Survey Monkey tool to make one.

Create your own user feedback survey
I created the questions after creating a free account.  There are some paid functions, which I did not use.  I would advise you to remove a logo if it auto adds it, as it did for me.  This is a paid feature and while it does make the survey look more professional, it is not necessary to send out a basic evaluation.

In my other class, instructional technologies, I just taught a cooking class called Healthy Swaps.  I made the survey embedded above as what I would use as a Level One evaluation that I could send my students if it was a real class.  Survey Monkey allowed me to pick how I wanted the responses to be recorded and even evaluated if my survey was too long.

Please give this program a try!  It can be an important tool in your performance metrics.