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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Virtual Post-It Boards-Tempting Tempest

Content Collaboration, Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, 1.3.4 Contribute to the exchange of ideas within a learning community. 3.1.2 Participate and collaborate as members of a social and intellectual network of learners, is the main focus of Edistorm which made the Top 25 list for 2011 as selected by the American Association of School Librarians.

Edistorm is an application that allows for online sticky note collaboration with multiple users in real time.  As an educator the service is free to make one private storm at a time.  When that storm is closed or archived it becomes read only.  Another storm can then be created.  If multiple storms within a classroom(s) with additional functions are desired there is educational pricing.

When signing up to use Edistorm a first and last name, email address, username and password need to be given.  Users must be 13 years old.

The first window that appears when creating a storm asks for the storm name, type of storm template (interesting templates for educators; IE. Venn diagrams) to be used, how many votes per person will be allowed, privacy, a private storm URL is shown for that storm, and an invitation to users box where email addresses are entered. Once the Create button is clicked a new screen pops up.  On this screen text, an image or a video can be added.  These can be edited, deleted or the color of the notes can be changed.  Please note that when I was using IE8 the edit and delete option were not available.  I had to switch to Google Chrome.


Invited users can vote on which idea or ideas they favor the most as well as leave comments.

A storm can be exported to XLS , PDF or a Report Summary can be generated.  These can be saved or printed.

 A legend of all the note colors is on the left.  Each color can be named to represent a different type of idea.  Ideas can be sorted by the top chosen, no votes, new ideas, old ideas, recently commented, my ideas, my votes and recently modified.

This looks to be another stellar example of online collaboration that can be utilized well in or out of the classroom.

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