Best Bytes: Collaboration tools to get the best from everyone
Posted on June 6, 2011 by Amy Chatfield | 1 Comment
Submitted by Amy Chatfield, University of Southern California
Coordinating schedules has never been harder, but collaboration is required in our jobs and our professional relationships, and sometimes just for fun. These free online tools make it easier to work with people across town or across time zones and gather, collate, and present the best ideas from everyone.
Crocodoc is a free website made for gathering comments on visual materials. If you can display it on a computer screen, you can upload it to Crocodoc– it supports common file types like PPT, PDF, text, .doc, .xls, and .jpg, and if your native file type isn’t supported, you can upload a screenshot of your file. Each uploaded document receives a unique URL and can be password protected (free registration is required to use the password feature). Viewers of your document can edit text (underline, strikeout, add new text, highlight) and add boxes, comments, notes, and draw on the document. Each annotator’s comments and changes appear in different colors, making it easy to see individual contributions. This is especially useful for collaborating on graphic materials– make a poster or flyer, design a webpage, or perfect the layout of your newsletter. Crocodoc files can also be embedded into static webpages to add interactive functionality and gather comments from anonymous contributors.
NitroPDF Reader is Windows-only, free software with almost all the capabilities of the expensive Adobe Acrobat Pro software. You can open any PDF in NitroPDF Reader and add new text by typing anywhere in the document. It can also sense lines and boxes on PDFs, so is great for filling out PDF forms. You can take a “snapshot” to make an exact copy of any part of the PDF — images and words– and copy it to another document. A “sticky note” can be added to indicate suggested changes at a specific point in the text, and text can be highlighted, crossed out, or underlined. NitroPDF Reader also lets you convert any file to PDF (great for Word documents), or extract plain text from a PDF.
Mixed Ink aims to help groups assemble their best ideas in a written document. We have all seen the results of a Microsoft Word document passed between five people with the “track changes” command turned on– the material is so covered with lines and boxes and comments, one can hardly discern the original text! On MixedInk you set up a project site — free for one project, but you must pay if you want to run multiple projects concurrently– and invite contributors by email. Each project contributor writes their own document in the MixedInk word processor, and others in the project vote on each document. Documents within a project are ranked and displayed according to votes gained. As a project member writes a new document in a project, the site scans the existing documents in a project and suggests related sentences from documents with high vote counts, and permits the project member to add these popular sentences to their document.
Type With Me is a very basic, simple tool for gathering written comments from a large group. Create a free document (no account required) and share the unique URL with anyone, or embed the document in a static webpage. Anyone viewing the webpage can type their ideas and comment on other’s ideas. Each author’s comments and text appear in a uniform color. Type With Me also includes a sidebar chat window next to each document, so you can type comments to other writers without adding them to the document. This is a great tool for gathering anonymous comments or taking minutes collaboratively.
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June 6th, 2011 @ 9:18 am
Great post! I’ll have to try some of these.