At a Glance:

Enables students to collect, consume, and share multimedia online Allows either real-time or asynchronous collaboration No need to purchase special software or equipment Great for online education

7 Things You Need to Know about Collaborative Multimedia Boards

A white paper from Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State
1. What Are They?
In general, a collaborative multimedia board is an online space where participants are able to collect, consume, and edit data and then share it with the world. Some spaces are linear in nature, such as Prezi, and some are nonlinear, such as Spaaze and Glogster. These cloud-based tools eliminate the need for special software and are mainly crossplatform, which allows equal participation for each student. Uses can range from the simple, like organizing a photo album, to the complex, like an interactive multimedia presentation.

Who to Contact:
Education Technology Services Hannah Inzko: e-mail: [email protected]

The Usage:
SOC 300 Sections 1 & 2 (32 students total) Laurie Mulveys SOC 300 course is made up of the teaching assistants working with Sam Richardss SOC 119 class, both of which are working on the same project, the Family-Home Project. Students are encouraged to provide other students with a glimpse of who they are by posting an image of where they grew up. Instead of creating a Facebook group, Laurie decided to have them use Spaaze instead. Details of the project are at: http://www.worldinconversation.org/soc-119/ soc-119/family-home-project/. It was a very easy and efficient way of getting all of the information into one spot. Mulvey never even talked about the project in class. She just decided to do it one week and sent direction about how to log on to Spaaze and the images were there when they came to class the following week. It was easy and helped to catalyze the conversations about cultural differences. Students were excited to do it and excited to show a personal piece of their lives. Mulvey said it is about breaking assumptions. There were many moments where the students imagination about their classmates was limited by their stereotypes in such subtle ways that they could not see it, but when they saw the images, they could see beyond the stereotypes in very important ways. They are now doing the same home project with students in Gaza and the West Bank. It is amazing how much differently the conversations go and how much further they deepen when they can see beyond individuals in the room. The students seemed to enjoy using the site. Some who usually participate the least actually posted the photos from class because they had their computers in the classroom.

2. Whos Using Them?

Collaborative multimedia boards are becoming more popular in education. Teachers use tools like Spaaze as classroom bulletin boards to remind students of assignments and class announcements. Purdue University has created a wiki about Spaaze. This wiki goes in-depth on how Spaaze works and includes links to K-12 lesson plans as well. Glogster enables students to make multimedia posters on the web. It is already a popular tool in K-12 schools, and even has education accounts for schools, called Glogster EDU. The popularity of this tool is evident via YouTube videos of interviews with students and teachers. In the videos, it is apparent that students really enjoy being creative and using multimedia related to the topic of their Glogster poster. Prezi has become an alternative to PowerPoint for many students and educators. Through reading a Prezi message board, it is apparent that many K-12 and university educators are using this tool to engage students. Higher education institutions are using Prezi as well. A message board user with the handle Ptrsnja had this to say about Prezi: I am in a teacher training program at Concordia University in Montreal, QC...I use multiple platforms (Mac, PC, MS Word, OpenOffice, and so on) and Prezi is the only presentation software that consistently works on every machine, easily and quickly...Im also fairly certain Ive gotten better grades because my presentations were more engaging, lively, and clear because of the nonlinear aspects. Prezi is more than just an alternative to PowerPoint, however. Some are using Prezi as an interactive portfolio or resume.

3. How Do They Work?

Collaborative multimedia boards provides a user-friendly, media-rich, and teamworkoriented service by integrating various technologies including cloud storage, browserbased asynchronous processing, real-time synchronization, and OpenID, to name a few. Cloud-based storage centrally stores the contents and provides users references to such resources as a Wikipedia entry, a news article, a research publication, a YouTube video, or any information available online. For example, users can embed a YouTube video in their e-mail without actually attaching the large video file. Todays browsers have a sophisticated user interface and smooth workflow. Asynchronicity means users do not have to wait for the back-end synchronization to finish to continue working. For example, Gmail lets users continue to compose an e-mail while a large attachment is being uploaded in the background. One example of real-time synchronization is multiple editors working on a document in Google Docs. When a user is editing one part of a document, other parts being edited can also be seen in real time. This significantly cuts down communication time. OpenID addresses the inconvenience of each website requiring a user to sign in with a separate account. Websites supporting OpenID accept users existing accounts from other services to sign in. By mashing up such technologies, collaborative multimedia boards provide users with an easy way to collaborate on a project in an intuitive drag-and-drop manner. For example, a

Related Links:
Useful Tools Spaaze: A Virtual Corkboard http://www.usefultools.com/2009/12/ a-virtual-corkboard/ YouTube Spaaze http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9ku3RZH2c9Q Layers Prezi http://layersmagazine.com/prezi.html YouTube What is Prezi? - The official intro video http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pxhqD0hNx4Q Schooltube Glogster Instructions http://www.schooltube.com/user/Glogster Glogsters YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/glogster

team may use Spaaze to collaboratively plan an event on a large virtual board. One user can write the marketing text on one part of the board and another user can drag and drop images and videos of past events around it, while yet another two users brainstorm on places to distribute the marketing literature. The ability to see each others activities in real time helps produce a coherent result.

4. Why Are They Significant?

Collaborative multimedia boards allow users to create and edit boards online with other users either via real-time or asynchronous participation. There is no need to purchase specific software or special equipment. Students can easily access these creative collaborative environments without needing to be in the same geographic location or time zone, thereby providing an excellent and flexible alternative for online education. With the ability to incorporate multiple forms of mediavideos, photographs, audio files, writingstudents can choose to participate in ways they are comfortable with, which in turn offers them the opportunity to be introduced to and to explore other forms of media.

5. What Are the Downsides?

Each collaborative multimedia board offering has distinct benefits to the user, but there are some potential drawbacks that should be considered when choosing a tool. Spaaze, for instance, is a very free-form virtual corkboard that allows complete freedom when navigating and creating a document. For this very reason, Spaaze does not allow for an easy way to create a linear progression of information. Similarly, Prezi allows for a truly curated navigation of the collaborative space but would not be an ideal tool for developing a free-form environment. Another consideration is the security and privacy of data placed on these cloud-based services. While it is becoming increasingly common to externalize the storage of academic data to third-party services like Google Documents, YouTube and the like, it does still have its risks as the safety of this data is being put into corporate hands. A final security- and privacy-related consideration is the management of access to the collaborative space you choose. Some services require accounts to be created with them directly; others allow for linking of accounts from popular sites like Gmailor you might consider creating a single account to be shared with all collaborators. Each has potential drawbacks ranging from the hassle of getting users to create accounts to not being able to determine who made what changes. Managing ease of setup versus control of usage is something to take into account after selecting a service.

Research Team:
Hannah Inzko Heather Hughes Lauren Beal Nick Smerker T.K. Lee Robin Smail Sam Richards Laurie Mulvey

6. Where Are They Going?

At this point, Prezi and Glogster have larger development teams than Spaaze, which is run by a single individual, and marketing agendas that include academic and corporate backing, as well as fee-based services. Prezi is the most sophisticated of the three platforms and markets its product as an elite tool used by creative leaders to exceed the status quo of presentations. Glogster is marketed to mainstream youth on one platform, and to educators on its education platform, which has a different URL and enhanced functionality for managing user groups. Spaaze is marketed to the general public and has a what you see is what you get interface without extraneous advertisement or costs. Since these services are relatively new, it is difficult to predict how they will develop within the near future. For these services to stay current, they should remain easy to use, flexible, and unique with regard to the services they provide to users.

7. What Are the Implications for Teaching and Learning?

Sociology 300 section 1 class Spaaze board, spring 2011

Online collaborative tools like Spaaze help with student engagement and participation in a variety of ways. They allow students to build deeper relationships with one another while collaborating from a distance, which provides information from multiple contexts and points of view and allows open conversation. Since the tools are available 24/7, they increase participation outside of class, and as many students as needed can participate at any given point. These tools also level the playing field for each student for two main reasons. Since they are free and totally online, they give each student equal access to the software. In addition, for shy students, the tools being online allow for a more passive participation.

This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States Licence 2011 The Pennsylvania State University

Finally, these tools enable the sharing of an incredible amount of data and personal experience. Users have compared them to traveling to another country.
This publication is available in alternative media on request. Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce. U.Ed. ITS11-7023