Availability: Faculty/Staff
Poll Everywhere is a polling application and student response system. Instructors can engage students in class with real-time interactive questions. The live audience can use mobile devices like phones, tablets, or laptops to participate. Participation is conducted by using a mobile-friendly web page, the Poll Everywhere app, sending text messages, or by using Twitter.
Availability: Faculty/Staff
Adobe PhoneGap Build is a standards-based, open-source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Apps can be built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8. Users upload their HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript assets to the Adobe PhoneGap Build cloud service and it takes care of the compiling work.
Availability: Faculty/Staff | Sign in Online
Adobe Story CC Plus allows users to write screenplays and scripts, use scripts to generate schedules and production reports, and collaborate online.
Availability: Online
Adobe Spark is a web application used to create professional-looking social posts, webpages, and presentations. Spark is free and can be accessed at spark.adobe.com.
Availability: Faculty/Staff/Students
Comparable: Skype, Saba Meeting, Hangouts
WebEx is a web and video conferencing meeting service that consists of four centers: Meeting Center, Training Center, Event Center, and Support Center.
Meeting Center – sessions can be scheduled in advance and added to your calendar. Integrated voice and video, ability to share content, invite attendees, record the session. Meeting Center also includes a Personal Room with a web address that never changes, allowing students and colleagues to easily find your meetings.
Training Center – sessions can be scheduled in advance. It has all of the Meeting Center features plus polling, testing, and breakout session options.
Event Center – schedule large-scale online events. It has all of the Meeting Center features plus the ability to manage the event from invitations, reminder emails, and follow up communication.
Support Center – ability to view and control a customer’s desktop or applications to help resolve technical issues remotely.
WebEx runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices. UNC Charlotte Faculty, Staff and Students can access the system via webex.uncc.edu.
Availability: 7 day free trial or purchase a license
Comparable: Visio, Dia, Google Drawing
SmartDraw is a diagramming tool that can be used to create flowcharts, org charts, mind maps, and floor plans. Users can create graph-based, chart-based, or schematic diagrams.
SmartDraw integrates with Microsoft Office. With just a click, drawings can be sent to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook. It’s also compatible with Visio, allowing the user to import existing Visio files and continue work in SmartDraw.
SmartDraw Cloud allows users to create and edit diagrams in their web browser, whether they are on Windows or Mac.
There’s a 7 day free trial available for both the browser-based or desktop version.
Availability: Free account for up to 5 Voicethreads or purchase license
VoiceThread is a cloud application used to create collaborative slideshows of documents, presentations, videos, or images. Viewers can add their own voice, text, or video comments on the individual slides within the slideshow. These comments appear in the VoiceThread so all users with access can view and leave their own comments.
The VoiceThread can be shared via a link or embedded within a webpage. It can be set to private, shared with specific people, or shared publicly.
Licenses can be purchased, or a free account is available for creating up to 5 VoiceThreads. An up-to-date version of Adobe Flash is required as well as an Internet connection.
Availability: Free on web or iPad/iPhone App
Availability: Free Web Application
Comparable:
Piazza is a Q&A web service. It can be described as “mixture between a wiki and a forum” that can be used with learning management systems. Instructors can create a free virtual class and send out access codes to students. Students and the instructor can then create posts with questions. Everyone can join in to supply answers, hints, or discussion. Studies show that students are more likely to supply hints and help the original poster arrive at the answer themselves because they are also interested in learning the material. The instructor can moderate posts to correct mistakes and misinformation, but students posts generally receive responses much more quickly and with more detail than if each student asks the instructor directly.
Piazza integrates with every major LMS (Learning Management System, i.e. Moodle, Blackboard, etc).
SurveyShare is a web-based tool designed for:
It is available to all UNC Charlotte faculty for your courses and research. You can create and compile your own questions, or you can use or modify any of the 100 available templates. For more documentation, see: Center for Teaching and Learning > Academic Technologies > SurveyShare
Trello uses the “kanban paradigm” for managing projects, originally been popularized by Toyota in the 1980s for supply chain management. Projects are represented by boards, which contain lists (corresponding to task lists). Lists contain cards (corresponding to tasks). Cards are supposed to progress from one list to the next (via drag-and-drop), for instance mirroring the flow of a feature from idea to implementation. Users can be assigned to cards. Users and boards can be grouped into organizations.
It operates a freemium business model, as well as being cross-subsidized by other Fog Creek Software products. A basic service is provided free of charge, though a Business Class paid-for service was launched in 2013.
Google Forms is a tool that allows collecting information from users via a personalized survey or quiz. The information is then collected and automatically connected to a spreadsheet with the same name. The spreadsheet is populated with the survey and quiz responses. Forms can be embedded in websites for surveys, information gathering, request forms, sign-up forms, etc.
The Qualtrics Research Suite is an advanced online surveying tool. It allows users to build a survey using drag and drop tools. Survey authors can select from varying types of questions including multiple choice, true/false, write-in, matching, check-all-that-apply, organize lists, and more. Authors can also build in logic such as if/then to create responsive surveys that react dynamically with how the users answer. Surveys can be taken all within a browser window and can accept forms of authentication to segment intended audiences. At the conclusion of the survey, authors have a suite of analytic tools available to pull statistics from the received data.
Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on amodel–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS.
Joomla is written in PHP, uses standard programming techniques and stores data in a MySQL, MS SQL, or PostgreSQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes,blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. Joomla supports over 60 languages.
As of February 2014, Joomla has been downloaded over 50 million times. Over 7,700 free and commercial extensions are available from the official Joomla! Extension Directory, and more are available from other sources. It is estimated to be the second most used content management system on the Internet after WordPress.
Google Drawing is a basic cloud-based paint/drawing application that can be accessed directly through any web browser. Drawing is useful for making basic sketches, diagrams, and performing basic image editing. Drawings are automatically saved to Google’s servers (Google Drive), and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents). Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.
Drawing also gives users the ability to share the document. Typically when a normal document is shared the recipient accesses a copy from one point in time. With a Google Drawing the document is shared in real-time, so recipients can always access the most recent version of the document. Sheet owners can also grant permissions for the recipient to comment on the document, edit, or revision. This introduces real-time collaboration, where multiple users can be editing the same document simultaneously, see each others’ edits, and even chat with each other in a sidebar.
Availability: Faculty/StaffGoogle Slides is a basic cloud-based presentation tool that can be accessed directly through any web browser. Presentations are automatically saved to Google’s servers (Google Drive), and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents). Presentations can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.
Slides also gives users the ability to share the document. Typically when a normal document is shared the recipient accesses a copy from one point in time. With a Google Slide the document is shared in real-time, so recipients can always access the most recent version of the document. Sheet owners can also grant permissions for the recipient to comment on the document, edit, or revision. This introduces real-time collaboration, where multiple users can be editing the same document simultaneously, see each others’ edits, and even chat with each other in a sidebar. There are many other powerful features in Google Slides.
Google Sheets is a basic cloud-based spreadsheet editor that can be accessed directly through any web browser. Spreadsheets are automatically saved to Google’s servers (Google Drive), and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents). Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.
Sheets also gives users the ability to share the document. Typically when a normal document is shared the recipient accesses a copy from one point in time. With a Google Sheet the document is shared in real-time, so recipients can always access the most recent version of the document. Sheet owners can also grant permissions for the recipient to comment on the document, edit, or revision. This introduces real-time collaboration, where multiple users can be editing the same document simultaneously, see each others’ edits, and even chat with each other in a sidebar. There are many other powerful features in Google Sheets.
Google Sheets can also be linked to a Google Form to collect data for surveys, web forms, and many other purposes.
Google Docs is a cloud-based word processor that can be accessed directly through any web browser. Documents are automatically saved to Google’s servers (Google Drive), and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents). Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.
Docs also gives users the ability to share the document. Typically when a normal document is shared the recipient accesses a copy from one point in time. With a Google Doc the document is shared in real-time, so recipients can always access the most recent version of the document. Doc owners can also grant permissions for the recipient to comment on the document, edit, or revision. This introduces real-time collaboration, where multiple users can be editing the same document simultaneously, see each others’ edits, and even chat with each other in a sidebar. There are many other powerful features in Google Docs.
UNCC has the basic Google Apps suite available for all faculty, staff, and students.
Drupal is a free and open-source content-management framework written in PHP. It is used as a back-end framework for at least 2.1% of all Web sites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including WhiteHouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.
Drupal must be installed on the web server hosting the needed content. UNCC has Drupal hosting as a service which is described here.
Availability: 