Dave Tchozewski’s Blog

I was involved in something really cool last Saturday.

David Fisher, DEN Guru, DENvisory Board Member, DEN Star and more, and I Skyped today to collaboratively complete an application to present at the 2013 ISTE Conference.  What a neat way to get our work done.

ISTE offers a downloadable help file for concurrent sessions detailing the items that need to be provided for the application.  So, I opened up that file and started a shared Google Doc with ISTE items outlined in the doc.  We were both able to provide needed information on the Google Doc that could be copied and pasted into the application when needed.

Visualize this: On a Saturday morning, we are both sitting in our home offices, me in Michigan, David in Florida. We were both wearing our Saturday morning best. Coffee in one office, tea in another.  Fishers’s dog was resting comfortably on the office sofa while his daughter bounced around the room trying to distract our process. We had a video Skype session active. We each had the shared Google Doc open. David had the ISTE app open.  We were able to discuss and edit in realtime.

This was one of the most productive 1.5 hours I have spent collaborating.  We would both read the same section, discuss, edit, review, edit, review, copy and paste.  We would converse to get a better sense of the “sound” of our written work.  Each of us could edit the Google document and the changes appeared in realtime.  The final step was for David to “share his screen” with me for one final review of the ISTE proposal.

Submit.

Cool.