Communication and Collaboration Toolkit

I have learned a lot about communication and collaboration over the years as a student, and I keep learning about it every time I come across these kinds of situations where I have to work with a group, like I did with the latest stop-motion project. One of the things that I have found so harmful to a group's communication is when someone gets their feelings hurt, or someone is a bully. I have been in groups before where people aren't open to hearing other people's ideas, and I have been in groups where there are people who are overly sensitive to critique. This little photo caught my attention when I was looking through pinterest, because I have mentioned a couple times in my earlier blogs that I thought our group was good with communication by avoiding things like this:

Whenever ideas were flying around, and someone's got dropped, we were never hurt because our communication was so good. Any one of the things on that list, though, could have caused our communication to come to a standstill, and that's not good for anybody in the group. It's just a good rule of thumb to keep in mind. The group needs to realize that it will do its best when feeding off of each other's ideas, but in addition to that, they also need to be sensitive of those people's feelings who don't get their ideas across as well, or get them rejected. 

There are also a ton of online tools you can use to collaborate with your group, while in the same room, or in different cities! The Internet provides all types of workplaces for groups, such as Google Docs, where everyone shares a document and can add to and edit the text. This is not only good for writing a paper, but it can be a helpful way to brainstorm ideas without being in direct contact with every member of your group. The Dropbox is also helpful in this way, as it allows you to share files between computers and people. 

There are so many useful tools on the Internet for collaboration, and this picture just shows a few! All of these services and more can be a humongous boost for working together. Technology is making it easier than ever to work successfully and efficiently in groups.