The following are the current tools that we made use over the past weeks:
Facebook Groups. We decided to create a Facebook group that is exclusive to us. We think that through this, we can easily contact one another since Facebook, nowadays, is a very popular medium of communication. It also served as our announcement board, wherein, whenever there are new deadlines and submissions for the course, a member can easily post the activity/project, plus its details, that is to be submitted. Moreover, the Facebook group allows every member to effectively and fastly anticipates all types of notification since Facebook's status updates regularly enabling the group to see each announcement or additional notification earlier than expected.
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| Our Facebook group |
Skype & Yahoo! Messenger Conference. We used Skype and Y! Messenger to discuss what must be done over a specific school activity. Moreover, this are the primary tools used for our online meetings. The Yahoo messenger's conference function enables the group to engage not just in group chat but also through voice chat. This enables the group to effectively convey each person's ideas in the event that explaining a difficult scenario takes too much time when it's typewritten. Skype's Video conferencing enables the group to increase the voice chat's capability since Skype's connection is much faster and clearer compared to Yahoo Messenger's voice chat.
GoogleDocs and Typewith.me. Googledocs and Typewithme is an online public document that allows groups of people to view, edit and type with people at the same time. These tools are the best social media tool in terms of research paper creation and collaboration of ideas since every person in the group can type simultaneously. At the same time, the leader of the group may start synthesizing and editing other people's typewritten sentences if they wish to modify someone else's work. Since these tools are public documents, people can save, import and even export different revisions of the document in case they want to use the old version or the latest version.
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| GoogleDocs used for the Group Blog |
Dropbox. Dropbox is a web-based storage service that we used to synchronize files. We uploaded files that are needed in the class so we could update our drafts, blogs, and other documents that we need to submit. In using Dropbox, we were able to organize our files and save us more time to spend on other activities. Moreover, Dropbox allows us to back-up our important group files in the event that a crash, virus or whatever form of data deletion may occur on anyone's laptop or pc. This is similar to sharing files with people in a more efficient way than uploading them in a website or attaching them through e-mail.
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Our group Dropbox
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KeepandShare. KeepandShare is an online collaboration website that helps users organize their their tasks and schedules in work, school or even at home. Moreover, KeepandShare have different features like (1) Time Slots and Appointment Scheduling, (2) Calendar Printing, Searching and Sharing, (3) Dashboard, (4) File sharing, etc. This really helped the group to manage our time not just in SOC-MED, but also in other subjects.
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| Team calendar |
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| Adding members who can view the Calendar |
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| Users can also create a group so that it can be easily shared |
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| Group's To Do List |
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| Shared To Do List (accessed from another member's account) |
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| Print Calendar option |
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| Own dashboard |
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| Sharepages |
Overall, the group was able to use different kinds of social media tools however, it can be noted that there are different kinds of social media tool and each tool does a more specialized function than the other and that some social media tool, although maybe comparable to another, gives a much better performance than expected.
Example: Googledocs and Typewith.me are both online public document that allows groups to create a document and type in it at the same time. Although both social media tool does the same kind of functionality, one of them is better in terms of efficiency, reliability, and overall feature. Googledocs gives the basic overview similar to what a user can do to a Microsoft word document. However, in terms of efficiency in typing and displaying of public data, Typewith.me surpasses Googledocs because Typewith.me does not lag when many people type at the same time.
Another comparison would be Yahoo messenger's voice chat and Skype's video conferencing. Although both have the same functionality, but Skype has an additional value added feature which is the video conferencing. Not only the line and connection of the voice chat is better than yahoo messenger, but it's also much faster than yahoo's voice chat making voice communication smoother and more audible.
Lastly, each social media tool's capability and functionality can be used in a specific type of method that suits the user's/group's convenience. Example: If the group needs to discuss difficult concepts that cannot be understood easily through means of chatting, then voice conference is definitely the best way to go. But if the group needs a social media tool that will enable them to synthesize ideas at the same time, then an online public document tool would be more efficient to use than voice conferencing.
