Jessica is a public high school principal based in Minnesota. She’s been serving as a principal for five years now, after serving as a teacher for 10 years. She is wondering whether there are free online collaboration software tools for the students in her school. She asks—
“Hello, a friend, who is also a principal in Massachusetts, told me that in her school, the teachers are using online collaboration tools with their students. These tools, my friend told me, are free and readily available online. I’d like to know more about these tools. I am also really interested in getting good and simple collaboration tools but we don’t have funds for that. Are there collaboration tools that do not ask for money or fully available in demo versions? Or if they have a cost, are they cheap? Thanks!” – Jessica, MN
Thanks Jessica for asking. We are happy to help you. In case your school needs to improve its accounting system, feel free to check out this side-by-side comparison of the top accounting applications.
The good news: There are a number of top and free online collaboration software tools for you and your students. But before we share with you some of the best software tools, let us first discuss what they are.
Online collaboration software tools
Generally, online collaboration tools allow a number of people to work together in a task or project in real-time over the Internet. They can work together on various tasks or projects, such as word processor documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and others. There are tools you can buy online, but there are a good number of free online collaboration software applications which you can use. A review of these free tools shows they are usually cloud hosted. In short, all you need is a good Internet connection and you can use these tools right away in your school.
They are easy to use and set up, so your teachers and students will not have a hard time using them. All reputable tools have security features, assuring that those who are not included in the group project or workplace would not be able to see the documents the team has been working on. In addition, some free online collaboration software tools offer encryption, an additional security layer making your documents or files unreadable to others not included in the project.
Here are some outstanding free online collaboration software tools you can use:
- Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing. This app is a good way to support collaboration between and among your students in a productive and fun way. It is regarded as among the best collaborative drawing apps for tablets and smartphones.
- Debate Graph. This amazing tool allows students to participate in group brainstorming or informative collaborative debates. They can work in a task together to create graphs which can be submitted to the teacher or presented in class.
- Primary Wall. Designed for schools, Primary Wall allows students and teachers to work together, adding sticky notes to the group “wall”. It is simple, user-friendly and fast. It’s great for doing class brainstorms.
- WordPress. Popular and easy to use, Wordpress is a good tool for producing a class blog, and allows your students to collaborate together online.
P.S. For further reading on collaboration software, I recommend the following helpful guides: how group collaboration software can help your small business; where to look for cheap vendors of web collaboration software; and 3 highly recommended collaboration software for small business.
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