Managing Group Projects Online with Google Docs and ManyMoon.com

Many  times in academia students are asked to work in groups to finish an assignment such as a research paper, video, or other project. While  many educators advocate group projects in education, how often are students not provided the necessary tools to coordinate and manage their group projects?  Businesses use project management tools to coordinate their tasks, efforts and documents all the time.  Why shouldn’t students in college regardless of them being in Business degree program or not?

At the University of South Florida, students’ emails are now powered by Google Apps. The university has provided students the collaboration tools by becoming a Google University. Here students can work together on papers, presentations, websites, and even conversation with Google talk while being in different parts of the state or country.   Google Docs allows the students the access to this type of collaboration, but in itself does not handle the management of meetings, tasks, milestones, Due dates and features that are used in business to manage group projects.

Enter ManyMoon.com

Manymoon.com

Manymoon.com provides many project management tools with in its online environment. Another great feature is students can login into manymoon.com with their  USF student email address (i.e. student@mail.usf.edu) and use the service for free!  Students just need to choose Google Apps from the login menu.

In the next box the student types in their USF email address.  The next window will ask for permission to use their email account with Manymoon.com.

After students have logged in to the system, they will have the ability to create projects.  Once the project has been created, other students can be invited by email, tasks and milestones can be created, and Google Docs can be created or attached to the new project.

Students are presented with a project dashboard, which provides easy access to many of the features of manymoon.com.

The Many Moon service is free for with storage limitations and some features are not included. Branding, Customizability, More Storage, Email features, and other extra features that are more like “Nice to Haves” are apart of Many Moon paid for features. Click the image below to learn more about the upgrade options of Many Moon. 

The University of South Florida is adding to its collection of technology tools to benefits students in their course work. The addition of Google Apps and Many Moon is just an example of this forward thinking Research One University.

About these ads