Applications to Promote Cooperative Learning Groups

I am going to take a time out from reviewing timelines to do a short post about applications that can promote group work in face to face or online classes.

When looking for a way to help my college students organize their group projects and to support their future students with mild/moderate exceptionalities I ran across the following sites:

The first site has over 60 applications for collaboration that can be used for educational purposes and beyond and the second site focuses on 20 collaboration sites and is geared toward college students:

•http://mashable.com/2007/07/22/online-collaboration/

•http://www.scholarshipexperts.com/college-life/collaboration-tools-for-students/ 

Some of my favorites so far are: 

•Edmodo

–Alternative to forming groups on Facebook.  It allows you to make groups, have discussions, quizzes, and more. It doesn't work as well as the Canvas platform for my purposes, but I am teaching it to my students as a tool they can use when they get out into their classrooms and do not have access to Canvas.

–http://www.edmodo.com/

•Wiggio

–Managing Group work.  You can form groups to work toward a common goal.  I am using this with my face to face and online students to help them organize their group projects.  Within Wiggio, you can text, conference, make group presentations and more.

–http://wiggio.com/

•ooVoo

–Video chatting with up to 12 people.  This is something that I am going to try with my online class because Skype and Google Hangouts sometimes do not have reliable connections and our group discussions have been getting cut off.

–http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx 

I will continue to update as I learn more about the different applications.