Google seem to be offering more and more new tools and over Christmas I stumbled upon Shared Spaces. Courtesy of the Wave APIs a range of gadget / collaborative thingymebobs or tools have been made available. The sort of tools that can make learning fun and a little more interactive. I am not saying that these are ‘amazing’ but fun in 1-2-1 schools in particular.
If you already have a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account you don’t need to sign up for the service, just click on the gadget you’re interested in and simply share the URL, tweet, buzz or email.
I had a look over the polling gadgets and trialled the Yes/No/Maybe Gadget. A very quick way to poll a class, colleagues, anyone and there are plenty more gadgets or spaces. Sadly, 23:50 is not necessarily the best time to trial a collaborative tool so I will look back in the morning.
Use the Waffle gadget to pick the date for a meeting or event, annotate a shared map of where your delegates are from. Yes, collaborating gaming might be a distraction, but there is Sudoku and chess.