Staff Collaboration Part II

For our staff meeting this Thursday, we're going to be collaborating on a Google doc. Everyone has been asked to bring a laptop or other device to use. This is new territory for some, but it should be a great learning experience for everyone....I hope!

4.21 Update: At our staff meeting everyone had either a laptop or iPad to work with. This alone was new territory for some staff and I was impressed with the willingness to learning something new, especially for those who had never used an iPad.

It took about 20 minutes for everyone to get familiar with whatever device they were working on (some Mac laptops, PC laptops, iPad) and to log-in to Google, find our site and open the document we were to collaborate on (a staff reorganization document).

Once the document was open, it didn't take too long for everyone to start adding comments to the original doc. In my opinion, this created more discussion among the group because we could see, in real time, what others had to contribute and we could build on those ideas.

Overall, it was a great introduction to Google sites/docs....and saved a few sheets of paper, too! We'll be working on this document throughout the next few weeks, individually, and during upcoming meetings.

Staff Collaboration

Even though our program staff is a rather small group (8 people), we are still looking for a better way to collaborate and share program information with each other. Under our current system, we have staff who are the "gate keepers" of a rather wide and varied range of program information which includes everything from graduate school application procedures to how to plan a professional development day. Typically, documentation produced by various staff is saved into the Education Program folder on the shared network drive, stored away where it seems no one can find anything when needed. The other problem with saving files to the network is accessibility. Unless you use a PC, you're kind of shut-out. So, we needed a better way to share information with ease of accessibility.

To make a long story short, staff has adopted the idea of using a Google site for collaboration. We started by creating a Google calendar which everyone has access to and can edit. As some staff were more comfortable with technology than others, this was a good place to kind of  "break the ice" and get used to the Google interface and editing tools. As more staff become comfortable with editing the calendar, the next step will be the creation of our staff Google site. Stay tuned!