PennEduTech

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

As we increasingly need to collaborate with each other across space and time, getting together with peers and colleagues gets more and more complicated. We’ve got a free tool that might make your life a bit easier: Yugma.

Yugma, whose name in Sanskrit means roughly “the state of togetherness”, is a free web conferencing tool that’s been gaining popularity in both business and academic worlds. Its key features include:

• Desktop Sharing
  Allows you to share your computer screen with others, no matter what application, software or operating system you’re using at the time. You can also share mouse and keyboard controls at anytime, so creating slides or reports together flows smoothly.
• Teleconferencing via telephone, Skype or other VoIP apps
  If you don’t have cell phone minutes to spare, or find yourself working in a quiet space, you can communicate via text in the chat window.
• Presentation Tools
  Highlight what you’re presenting and brainstorm your ideas using intuitive whiteboard drawing tools. You can save it all in a digital format you can review later or share with others.

You can use the free version of the tool to collaborate with up to ten people at a time. Click here to learn more and set up an account.

The College of General Studies hopes to receive a number of education accounts (with additional features such as recording) to share with faculty, students and administrators in the Penn community. Contact me if you’d like to try out a version of the tool with more features.

How could this tool help YOU? Have you used any similar tools you’d like to share? Have any ideas for how you might use the tool to improve engagement?