Skip to Main Content

NSCC's Mobile App Guide for Teaching and Learning: Collaborate

This guide is for faculty and students to help them better understand and use mobile apps (particularly OS, Android, and Windows) at North Shore Community College to enhance the teaching and learning environment.

Category Description

The collaboration apps allow for student-to-student or faculty-to-student collaboration and the sharing of materials, as well as synchronous and asynchronous interactions.

Contact ITD

Questions, Comments, or Suggestions?

We would love to hear from you!

Email us at itd@northshore.edu.

Dropbox

Place files and documents in the cloud and keep them updated across the different platforms, from desktop to laptop to mobile device.

Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod TouchDropbox

Cost: Free

Web Resources: Dropbox, iTunes, Google Play

Ideas for Educational Use: Students can store and share course-related documents through Dropbox.

Tips and Considerations: You start with 2 GB of storage, but can earn up to 18 GB with referrals.

Google+

"Stay connected and share life as it happens with Google+. Join a Hangout, post a photo, or see what friends are sharing while you're on the go."

Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, Web-basedgoogle plus icon

Cost: Free

Web Resources: Google, iTunes, Google Play

Ideas for Educational Use: Use Hangouts and Circles for class collaboration activities.

Tips and Considerations: Use your NSCC login information to access. Use Picassa for unlimited storage. Use the YouTube search box within to search for YouTube videos.

Google Drive

With Google Drive, you can store all your files in one place, so you can access them from anywhere and share them with others.

Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Web-basedGoogle Drive icon

Cost: Free

Web Resources: Google, iTunes, Google Play

Ideas for Educational Use: This is a good tool for student collaboration, as students can use the same space at the same time or different times to collaborate. Use to have students comment on each other's work, amend work, or team up on projects.

Tips and Considerations: Use your NSCC login information to access.

Google Hangouts

"Hangouts brings one-on-one and group conversations to life with photos, emoji, and video calls for free. Connect with friends across computers, phones and tablets."

Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Web-basedGoogle Hangouts icon

Cost: Free

Web Resources: Google, iTunes, Google Play

Ideas for Educational Use: Instructors can teach to multiple locations at the same time.

Tips and Considerations: Do trial runs with Google Hangouts before holding a session.

Voice Thread

"An interactive, collaboration and sharing tool that enables users to add images, documents, and videos, and to which other users can add voice, text, audio file, or video comments. You can post your VoiceThread on your website or save it to an MP3 or DVD."

Platform(s): iPad, iPhone, iPod TouchVoice Thread

Cost: Free

Web Resources: VoiceThread, iTunes

Ideas for Educational Use: It's the perfect tool for creating multimedia presentations in a relatively short time frame. It prompts students to think carefully about what they are going to say before recording themselves. The power of peer feedback and peer review is intuitively available to all participants in a VoiceThread conversation.

Tips and Considerations: VoiceThread does not allow multiple users to have simultaneous access to the same account. It may be necessary for an entire class to use a single class account login. As a result, students could remove or change comments made by others or inadvertently delete an entire VoiceThread. It could present an accessibility problem for some users.