While there may not be a lot of “bells and whistles” Wiggio has a great deal of capacity and potential for use in the classroom. Wiggio (Working in Groups) is free, online, intuitive, easy to use and set up for interaction and collaboration, and can be accessed anytime, anywhere. In my school, we used Wiggio for a middle level book club and as Susan Hall, coordinator of our summer reading program, noted “The kids loved it!” We had tried many different digital tools over time to generate discussion about literature and found with Wiggio that students responded more often, more thoughtfully to postings of peers.
Functioning like a listserv, learners get email alerts about new postings. Instead of waiting until the night before responses were due, students checked as they were notified, read, and responded almost immediately. Not only did this yield more than the required two responses, but deeper thinking about the ideas shared emerged. The stream of reading postings as they were developed seemed to afford more time to think and respond.
For the classroom teacher there are useful features to form and manage groups with administrative control. The groups are private and members must be invited to join so that all that is needed is an email account. Registration is not required, though participants can create profiles once they have accepted an invitation to join a group, remembering not to share private information. As the group is set up, the manager has options for postings to be sent to members by email as created or as a daily summary. There’s also an option that lets the group function as a discussion board with no email alerts. To ease the busy lives of teachers, reminders and alerts can be set up ahead of time and scheduled for release to groups.
Communication, collaboration, and interaction among group members are key functions facilitated through Wiggio. The page layout is straightforward with information about groups and its members on a left panel. Options tabbed at the top navigation bar for “feed, folder, calendar” define the essential workspaces. The feed tab opens the center panel of postings and communications. One can “start a conversation” or engage in existing conversations and easily add multimedia files and web links. The folder tab accesses stored files available to all group members such as group notes, collaborative work in progress, or sharing of resources. Meetings and other dates scheduled show up through the shared calendar tab.
On the right panel of the Wiggio page are many collaborative tools listed for easy access. Any group member can schedule an in-person event, a conference call, a virtual meeting or a chatroom session and with options to “start right now” or poll members on availability before setting time and place. Group members can create documents, spreadsheets, polls, or surveys and to-do lists to which others can add. Consider the possibilities of the poll feature to get a quick consensus through short answers, yes/no responses, or multiple choice questions. A question could be posed about what a character might do at a critical point in a story, or input on decisions can be sought about a group project, or queries made of reader perspectives on why an author chose to use a particular phrase. The possibilities with this classroom digital tool are many. Explore these links to learn more.
Denise Stuart is from The University of Akron, Ohio.
This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG)