Useful Tools

A friend of mine wanted help in making a decision, so he made a request using a blog post and asked for comments. In addition to that he set up a poll using PollDaddy.com. By using these two free tools a blog and a poll he was able to collect quantitative and qualitative data. I thought this was remarkable and I see how these tools could add value in an educational setting. Doing a Research study with a small group, this can be used to capture information and just making decisions on a whole.
Another tool that I have come across is huddle. This is a project management space, for my online class we are using it to work on a real project and it has been going well:

• The teacher uses it to set up tasks and deadlines.
• Email alerts are sent to the person delegated whenever a task is due.
• Discussion topics are created for each phase and we make decisions using the discussion forum. Email alerts are sent each time a post is made.
• Documents can be uploaded and edited online and it captures version history.
• The client is also included in the group so when we are finish with a document we request her approval through huddle and we get email alerts when she responds

The only problem that I have had is that the discussion forum allows a limited number of texts, but we’ve worked around it by making our post shorter or dividing one post into two.

What other useful tools are out there and how can they be used to improve and make processes easier?