ETG Launches Free Project Management Site for Teachers
In addition to basic project management, Enter the Group includes communications tools like blogs, message boards, and group polls. |
Newcomer Enter the Group has launched a hosted service designed to bring groups of teachers and students together to manage classroom projects.
The site, enterthegroup.com, is a full-fledged online project management and collaboration system that allows users to work in groups on their school-related activities. It includes support for the creation of unlimited projects, groups, individual task assignments within a project, task notifications (for status updates and the like), file sharing, calendaring, blogging, commenting, message boards, polls, chats, forums, and reporting tools. (With file sharing, there's no limit currently on the amount of data any user can store, though no individual file can be larger than 20 MB.) Permissions control which users can access projects, tasks, files, boards, and information about other users.
For K-12 schools, Enter the Group also allows users to create a special type of project called a "classroom," in which teachers can add assignments and course-related files, in addition to all of the functions available to other types of projects.
Classrooms can be used by teachers to organize students into class-specific group and update them on assignments, meetings, and other types of activities. |
Unlike standard, deadline-oriented projects, the classroom is designed as an ongoing type of project for which there's no specific conclusion.
The company explained that the system is designed not just to organize projects but to augment face-to-face classroom learning: "Enterthegroup.com ... tackles the shortcomings of today's classroom. It enables teachers to create virtual classrooms in which they can interact with students online, share handouts, post events to a shared calendar, conduct polls and create assignments. The virtual classroom enables students to interact with their group outside the brick and mortar classroom and keep track of their work. The benefit of having both a project and classroom feature is that they can be leveraged so a student may join a teacher's online classroom then create a project for an assignment."
Enter the Group is open now in beta form. It's currently free for all users. Further information can be found here.