RI+Sci+Collaboration+Tools

Introduction
This wiki is for Rhode Island science teachers. Its first use is as a sample workspace for a summer professional development workshop.

What collaboration tools might we use to develop our lesson plans?
//**Wikis**// - Wikis are websites that are editable by visitors to the site. It is usually possible to set the site's privileges so that its pages can be edited by everyone or only site members. In addition to text, some wikis allow users to embed other media such as videos. The video below provides a short and sweet introduction to what how wikis can serve as great tools for collaborative projects. media type="youtube" key="-dnL00TdmLY&hl=en" height="355" width="425" //**Google Docs**// - Though wikis are great for accumulating a set of shared products, they have at least two shortcomings for teacher collaboration. The first shortcoming is formatting. Though wiki pages can be formatted easily with a word processor-like editor, the editing tools do not provide enough control to determine in detail how pages will appear after they are printed. This is a problem when creating instructional materials that must be printed and shared. The second problem is that wiki pages //cannot be edited by more than one person at a time//. This means that it would be hard for several teacher to simultaneously work on different parts of the same lesson plan unless its parts were separated into different documents.

We can use Google Docs to solve the wiki's collaboration problems. Google docs can import or export to Microsoft Word formatted files, so Word can be used to tweak a document's final formatting. When several people are assigned to a Google Docs document as editors, they can each be simultaneously editing the document on their computer. This video explains Google Docs, a web-based word processor that will allow us to solve these problems.

media type="youtube" key="eRqUE6IHTEA&hl=en" height="355" width="425"

A Google Doc version of a sample lesson plan that starts with the Rhode Island lesson plan template is linked on the left sidebar. Right now, only Peter should be able to edit this document, and to everyone else, the document should be visible but not editable.