RE: Improve online collaboration - Community Feedback Forum - Community Feedback Forum

Some things that would help us:

A market place for teachers where they can announce ideas for collaboration and ask for other teachers to join. Teachers ask me how to start and a collaboration on the website and I find it hard to give a proper answer now, because it is very hard to find active teachers in the enormous amount of teacher accounts.

Possibility for teachers (after they found each other on the market place) to set up a collaboration group.

Possibility for cc's to start a campaign or competition. In Europe we would like to start a photo competition for example in order to inspire teachers and students to upload more pictures to their accounts. At this moment the school accounts are virtually empty and it would be nice to organize some activities that inspire schools to make their school pages more 'living' and thus interesting for other schools around the world. We would like them to upload pictures when they are doing measurements. They should then be able to indicate which photo they would like to submit for the '2014 GLOBE Europe photo competition'. Is that already possible or could you help us to make it possible?

We have a "collaboration partner finder" in the works. It would be good to talk about how it might work at the regional meeting..but the idea is to make it easy to say:

"Find me a x grade teacher who is doing x protocols in x country/region and wants to collaborate."

We're also just starting talk about a GLOBE classroom idea that would support teachers who want to collaborate with an area to see each other's data and share ideas/thoughts about what they're doing..will review the ideas in a few weeks with you and others who are interested at the meeting..

All,

Launching on Saturday, December 20th is a new tool to allow GLOBE teachers to find other members who are interested in collaborating on GLOBE projects, protocols or other activities. Use the advanced search tool to identify potential collaboration partners based on their country, language, school grade level, protocol interests, GLOBE projects/campaigns and more.

For the tool to be effective, we are asking all GLOBE members to review their profile settings to ensure it is accurate and up-to-date. To help facilitate this, the first time you come to the collaboration tool, a summary of your profile settings will be displayed along with a link to edit your profile information and the protocols you are interested in.

Pertinent profile information such as the languages you speak and the option to opt-out of being listed on the collaboration tool can be found under the 'GLOBE Info' link in your profile.

Additionally, make sure you are associated with the correct organization, your organization address is up-do-date and your primary organization (if you have more than one) is selected.

We hope you find this new tool beneficial to you. We are continuing to refine and improve the tool so send us any feedback you may have.

The tool will be located in the Community section of the website.
URL available on 12/21/14: http://www.globe.gov/community/find-a-collaboration-partner

Thank you,
The GLOBE Web Team

I am already looking forward to brainstorm on the enhancement of collaboration options through website at the regional meeting! We should also not forget to consider how to actually get the message to teachers. Everyone could have already started collaboration through the website, but only small percentage of teachers (and country coordinators as well) done so. I wonder what what the barriers are... They do not know about options and features? They generally find it difficult to handle the website? They are not used to collaborate online? Could be that the language is the main problem? They do not want to collaborate at all? Do they need an incentive, such as a picture contest?
Hope we will come to answers at some point!

Hello Bara
when you use the collaboration tool you get a list...and the problem comes after because you need to be "friend" to post your request on the "friend"'s wall...and I think most of them don't accept you as a friend ! For example I made 4 requests and I got only one answer.....So you can't collaborate. It would be easier to send an email because people read it, why it's not possible ??
michel Pedurand

Hi all,
The collaboration finder is a great tool, but you find a list of teachers and you don't have an idea what they would like to do. 
It would be great if a real marketplace idea could be added.

For example, I currently have a teacher who is interested in doing a project around (nuclear) power plants and the heating of the water around it and its influence on nature. 

It would be great if she could announce in a market place her ideas in such a way that other teachers can find her easily.

Thanks!
Matthijs