Vicki Davis's List: 11 Essential Tools for Global Collaboration

Most of our projects have 2 basic calendars:

1) a project calendar
2) teachers put class times in the calendar to find sychronous times to meet, if possible.

Create a group in timebridge to make setting meetings a snap! Also, if you link it with your Google calendar it can allow others to see your schedule as well.

When we started using this tool, the attendance at our weekly meetings went up.

You must have a web meeting tool that allows screensharing and reporting. This is the tool we use for Flat Classroom projects (full disclosure, they are a sponsor.)

One note -- close captioning and accessibility are now available in this tool. People who are blind and deaf can actually be empowered to use this tool and participate with others.

Those required to comply with ADA should consider if their web conferencing software allows for accessibilities.

"We create group skypechats and anyone who has a problem can ask and see who else is online to help with the project. Skype is a great backup and also wonderful to bring video into each other's classrooms when we see that we have a "hit" on times through our Google Calendar."

"Google groups is like discussion boards, however, the thing I like is that you can set up the questions to go to your email. All you have to do to answer the question that comes through the group is to reply to the email. We do this for all of the private things that the teachers need to discuss including any urgent issues and whoever is online is able to handle the problem.

The nice thing is that all of these emails and discussions are archived - even attachments and put on the google group web page and you can go back and search issues on the google group. That, and it is private - and every public private needs a private place for teachers to meet and work together."

Grassroots is the way to go and the way to help connect students to some really fascinating people is to use your twitter network to share about what you're doing. Just don't go overboard and be genuine and up front about what you're doing and you'll see many opportunities and things happen here.

"When we take applications for our projects, we love to use Google Forms because they are reliable, fast, and also will send custom notifications to the person submitting the form and to us in our emails! I have my students use these for surveys and to collect information as well!"

NOTE: This is being replaced by "skydrive."

"This is a new friend of mine. When we create nice documents that just have to be in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint - Office live gives us a shared workspace. So, instead of emailing back and forth word documents or powerpoints and not able to figure out where the newest one is - we can just save to Office Live. I'm going to teach my students to do this as well so that they can share the files with me for our book, and so they can easily transport their term papers from computer to computer.
"

"If you're going to have survey data that you must aggregate and use statistical analysis and also have to do some sort of validation up front to ensure data integrity - this is our tool of choice for Flat Classroom. This is one you have to pay for, but it is worth it to me."

We use this to create group bookmarks. It also creates lists and webslides (as are being used now.)

This is great for aggregating things and provides taxonomy as students can bookmark certain topics, but this also allows experts to volunteer by sending students bookmarks.
@coolcatteacher http://t.co/k8ocjGL4 is my dictionary, Evernote is my filing cabinet. #iste12

You can access your hackpads offline by syncing with dropbox. Very interesting concept.