inb4 google wave

July 26, 2012 5:45 AM

Do you know of any online solutions to collect submissions from a group of people and then archive it in a useful way?

Back story:
Currently, my Admin will ask teachers to write down followup questions, ideas, thoughts, etc on Post its after a staff meeting.
These ideas are sometimes re-typed and emailed out, or occasionally just put on the wall for the rest of the meeting.
I'm looking for a solution so that we could as a staff, compile our ideas into a online place and store them so that they would be archived and accessible. We all have laptops at staff meetings.

I envision it going something like this:
"Staff, please write down any resources/strategies you use to scaffold lessons for English Language Learners on the X"
X= newfangled wiki, forum, app...

Staff submits these ideas via simple GUI.

Submissions are easily viewed and archived as staff resource.

The solution could be something that is web based app, a third party website or even something I could install like a wiki or a forum.

Any and all resources that sound remotely useful are welcome. I'd rather sort through a ton of ideas than have people be afraid of it not being quite right. We would be happy to change our procedure to fit the right platform.

Thanks in advance.

posted by JimmyJames to education (7 answers total)

You can do this with a simple web form via Google docs, or be slightly more fomal and use something like Survey Monkey.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:46 AM on July 26, 2012

Gah, I meant to say we already use Google docs and Survey monkey. I was curious if there was something more elegant. Both would work, but neither is a great way to archive and then access the information later.
posted by JimmyJames at 5:52 AM on July 26, 2012

In the past, my workplace has used a blog (to which all employees could post) to handle something vaguely similar to this. (Totally different content, but the overarching concept is similar enough.) People can then follow up with comments, and if you tag well and consistently, the archive is pretty easy to browse. Not the most elegant solution, but it did the trick, and maybe it's worth considering for you, as well.

A wiki might not be as good if only because of the wiki coding. (Not sure if there are better interfaces than the ones I use, but if you want bold, lists, etc., you need to learn how to code it. It's not hard, but some people might be resistant and/or less savvy.)
posted by divisjm at 6:32 AM on July 26, 2012

I should probably note that the blog was only accessible by employees, so the general public couldn't read it. If you go this route, you might want to set yours up similarly.
posted by divisjm at 6:33 AM on July 26, 2012

I'm just checking: you do know you can set the results of a Survey Monkey survey to be public, right? Same with a Google form?
posted by DarlingBri at 6:40 AM on July 26, 2012

I'm just checking: you do know you can set the results of a Survey Monkey survey to be public, right? Same with a Google form?

Yep :) We extensively use both applications for some tasks and they work great, but for this use, going back to find the information in the future seems like a huge pain.
posted by JimmyJames at 6:46 AM on July 26, 2012

Elegance is one way to go about this, but another might be automation with a couple of hacks to make it convenient.

I'm thinking about ifttt.com, which you can use to take inputs from one place and shunt them somewhere else. I could envision all your staff having their own blogs, and the ifttt sucks the posts from the blogs tagged #admin and posts them together in one place on another blog. You might need to bolt on a yahoo pipe to achieve this, one that collates the rss feeds from all the blogs into a single rss feed. With wappwolf, Dropbox and google docs also bolted on, you could create some unbelievable processes. Your archive might end up existing in a few forms (Dropbox folder of docs; Wordpress blog; Facebook page; twitter stream) great when people want to choose how they access things.

Very clunky, but very powerful when it is all in place.
posted by 0bvious at 7:06 AM on July 26, 2012