Contribute Cloud is a lesson or presentation creation, distribution and collaboration platform. As the name suggests is a cloud-based which means that there is nothing to install, update or maintain on your system. All you need to access the system is a browser and head on over to http://contribute.cloud
The main benefit of Contribute Cloud is that you can take your documents from your Cloud Storage devices, add them to our system and then share them with your colleagues or students in a collaborative way. Think of your regular “PowerPoint” becoming a whole class teaching tool where all the students can receive a copy on their own devices. In a corporate setting, your colleagues can be making notes on the presentation with you and at the end of the session you all leaving with your own copy of the notes on your own device.
Contribute Cloud is taking files that are normally just personal files and making them “collaborative” – its a pretty cool concept.
In Education, Google Classroom is becoming increasingly popular and only this week there were statistics that roughly half of the schools in the United States are “Google Schools” meaning their either make use of the Google Apps For Educate (GAFE) or Chromebooks. This in itself creates an interesting opportunity for Contribute Cloud. If you are a Google Classroom user you are able to import your classes directly into Contribute Cloud so there is no duplication of information.
What is even more interesting is that Contribute Cloud does not “step on Google’s toes” it works with Google Classroom. GAFE is a great suite that allows you as as teacher to create an activity for a student or group of students. Deliver that activity via the Google Drive to the students. Students can then complete it and return it to you as the teacher for marking. This is great but what this does not give you is any whole class teaching tools. How can all the students see your activity on their device? I keep mentioning the work device as Contribute Cloud is operating system agnostic meaning that you have a modern browser, then you can connect to the system.
Contribute Cloud fills the gap that GAFE have conveniently left open for us being able to supply a piece of software that sits in and works with Google Classroom in a whole class teaching sense.
Building your lessons from multiple file types is quick and easy with Contribute Cloud. Simply select the files that you want to incorporate and then you can add them as slides in your lesson or presentation.
Then, add your students or colleagues to the email invitation or have them join manually at http://join.contribute.cloud. It could not be any easier.
There are no limits for how many students or colleagues you can add to the session and what is more, all of this is totally FREE!
Check it out today and create yourself your own free account.
Happy contributing!
