Google Groups is a free service which helps groups of people communicate using email and the Web. Every group has a home page hosted by Google where members can start their own discussions, announcement lists, and mailing lists in minutes. Google Groups makes it easier to read and participate in discussions than most commercial course management software, such as Blackboard or WebCT. All the replies to an initial post are gathered on one page. You can bookmark topics you’re interested in, and have new replies to that topic delivered to your inbox. Best of all, there are no pop-ups or banner ads displayed within Google Groups—only Google’s relatively easy to ignore text ads.
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Yahoo Groups is actually a Web-based e-mail list service that happens to offer tools for Chat, File and Database Sharing, Polls, a Calendar with reminders, and Membership management (so you can easily enroll course participants). You also get a choice of three options for monitoring group activity: 1) You may receive an email every time there is new activity in the group, 2) You may receive a summary email of activity once a day, or 3) You may opt to see your group email only when you visit the group’s site.
Best of all, Yahoo Groups is free! Ads? Yes, a few banner ads. But, hey, no big deal. Yahoo’s ads are a bit more conspicuous than those at Google, but customers report they learn fairly quickly to just click past them.
Up next: “Google Groups and Other Google Apps.”
claude
Great! So now you’ve got your course syllabus. Now, how about a simple calendar where you list all the milestones and due dates for your course? If all you want is a list of events, you can make your calendar with any of the HTML editors we’ve already mentioned, but if you prefer a month-at-a-glance version that really looks like a calendar, we have just what you need.
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