I often have students work in teams for different projects as diverse as team based learning, simulations or working together on a paper. Students have repeatedly told me one of the challenges have is that keeping up with what other people are doing (or not doing as the case may be) is challenging. Last semester I came across a website that allows you to create your own virtual cork board called http://corkboard.me/ [2015 update: the website no longer exists]. While the name is not original the website itself is pretty useful. There are other websites out there that do similar things but what makes corkboard so useful is that it is so darn simple. it allows you to post notes – and that is it. if you put the url into your browser it generates a new corkboard just for you. if you save that you can go back to the same corkboard. more importantly anyone else can as well and people can make changes at the same time in real time. an example of what it looks like can be seen below:
I have not had used corkboard a lot yet with students ( I am planning to do so in the fall) but I have used it with people I collaborate with and have found it to be very useful for brainstorming ideas and organizing thoughts and responsibilities. For one project each collaborator has a “nag” note for things they need to get done. It has become a real pleasure to remove other people’s nags from my note – and also a pleasure to add nag notes to other people. Of course every software has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side it is:
1) free
2) easy to use
3) useful for brainstorming and task assignment
On the minus side:
1) it is very simple
2) unless you pay for an upgrade it if someone gets the URL they can see and change what ever is on the cork board.
3) It can only paste non formatted text into a note (so if i want to paste something from word I need to first paste it into notepad or google or somewhere else)
All in all though it has proven to be very useful and I am looking forward to using it with my students.