Over electronic networks, educators can communicate and collaborate with students, teachers, administrators, parents, community members, and other educators with greater convenience and efficiency than ever before. While you are reading this, thousands of educators enjoy the convenience of corresponding, consulting, and collaborating with each other via social networks, e-mail, text messages, discussion forums, chat rooms, instant messaging, and VOIP (i.e., voice over internet protocol) to name a few.

Collaboration in particular is a process by which people work together on an intellectual, academic, or practical endeavor. In essence, they “co-labor” toward a common mission or goal. In the past, the process of collaboration occurred in person, by letter, fax, or on the telephone. Today’s high-tech collaboration connects individuals and/or groups over an electronic network (e.g., internet, intranet, cellular network, closed circuit television) using tools that are becoming increasingly cheaper, powerful, and more easily accessible. Working over an electronic medium allows collaborators to communicate and work together anytime, from anywhere, and from virtually any place on the planet. People from different parts of a building, school district, state, country, or continent can, for example, exchange information and, together as a team, develop documents, ponder ideas, discuss issues, reflect on their own practices, make decisions, or collate data. Collaborators can now work at a distance and accomplish just about anything that they at one time could only do if they were actually together in the same room at the same time. The limitations of space, pace, and time have been dissolved with today’s anytime, anywhere, on-demand work spaces and high-tech tools designed to help us synergize our talents and passions.

For example, William P. Pepin, Guidance Department Chairperson at North Smithfield Junior-Senior High School in Rhode Island writes:

"I am a strong proponent of technology and its benefits in the North Smithfield School District. Our school counselors and administrators use technology as a tool to collaborate on numerous issues. We use email and district wide servers to frequently work on projects together and to help organize schedules and meeting times. We have a separate folder on a shard drive that the counselors, technology staff, and administrators can use to share documents. We have been updating our graduation requirements with a draft that has been to the school admin, district admin, myself, and the RI Department of Education."

"Our new student information system, Infinite Campus, has allowed individuals with proper access to use data on both small and large levels. We can now examine data and make data based decisions in a way that we were never able to before. We are still implementing the system, but I look forward to using it to make better decisions." (personal communication, July 13, 2009).

By using appropriate technology, school counselors and administrators can collaborate with others from all over the world providing a body of resources and professional colleagues that would not otherwise readily present themselves. Collaborating with others on an international scale can also provide educators with a sense of belonging, a sense of camaraderie within a larger community. Using technology to collaborate, counselors and administrators can actively and interactively contribute to exploring innovative ideas and share best practices. With electronic collaboration, the adage "two heads are better than one" could just as easily be "two hundred heads are better than one." One person's provocative question can lead to many creative, exciting solutions. By sharing what they know with others, participants advance their own knowledge and the collaborative community's knowledge.

Typically, during the school day educators are pressed for time and lack opportunities to stop and reflect on their work experiences or move beyond on-the-fly brainstorming that often happens by chance in the hallway (Finkelstein, 2009). The asynchronous nature of electronic collaboration allows participants to contribute to the conversation when it’s convenient and to reflect on what others have said before responding. In addition, having to articulate professional struggles and suggestions in writing forces writers to take time to be thoughtful and reflect carefully about new ideas and pathways (Koufman-Frederick, Lillie, Pattison-Gordon, Watt, & Carter 1999).

Most educators are accustomed to short-term professional development seminars and workshops that provide finite information. Similarly, traditional collaboration occurs mostly during defined and time limited meetings convenient to all parties involved. Electronic collaboration allows for a sustained effort where participants can propose, try out, refine, and shape ideas themselves using a combination of live and electronic media or venues. For instance, counselors and administrators could attend (at the same time, different times; from one location or different locations) an online seminar (better known as a webinar) about, say, how to identify achievement gaps by disaggregating student data. They can then later interact over a follow up discussion board where participants share how they have demonstrated what they learned at their own schools. As they continue, they may identify a “sister” school to work more closely with and schedule a video conference to partner and further collaborate.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing have been able to index billions of web pages across the globe. However, they have not indexed all known pages. And, there exists so many good resources today that even some valuable resources may not make their way to the top of a search engine’s results list. Plus, search engines do not typically specialize in providing results that best reflects one profession such as counseling or education. Human review and recommendation of resources is still quite valuable. Many services exist that allow the members of a profession (or any community) to share, review, and recommend (or not) a list of web sites or “bookmarks”. Among many, examples of such services include:

I think most people forget that, at one time not very long ago, posting a video (or even a photo) online was a complicated and time consuming procedure. Definitely not today. One can capture video through their cameras, video phones, or webcams and almost instantly begin uploading to one of many video hosting sites. In addition, these online video warehouses have become social networks that provide the tools for people to connect while reviewing, commenting, or sharing videos. Videos can now also easily be embedded on any web page so that the videos, in practice, are syndicated throughout the web. Although many video sharing sites exist, the most popular include:

A collaboration portal is a one-stop destination, usually on the Web, where collaborators can co-create a page of resources, links, and even tools (also known as gadgets or widgets) to share and manage content. The following are a few popular ones:

Anglea Marsaglia, currently a teacher from Collier County, Florida writes about how she helped her school better communicate:

"At my school in Illinois, I created a site from NING (ning.com) for my administrator because she was unsatisfied with the interaction among teachers at faculty meetings. We decided to try this site (after I had used it with my high school students) with the faculty for several reasons: many were afraid to speak up in meetings, many had very little technology experience, and many had great ideas that never surfaced in meetings. On our NING I created a chat box and several discussion groups and assigned teachers to each discussion group. After even only the first use of NING the administrator loved it, as did the teachers (even the reluctant teachers said it was very cool and kind of fun). All teachers participated in the discussions and offered valuable insight that never before was offered. It was a fabulous experience because it was unintimidating and helped get the more "traditional" teachers to use technology. We liked it so much that everyone logged on every morning and announcements/info could be shared all day long. It was much easier and quicker than email!"

A blog (a portmanteau of the term "web log") is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog (Blog, 2011). Google owned Blogger.com describes a blog as, "A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world."

The technology that allows individuals to write one's own blog is so relatively simple and inexpensive that it is no surprise that blogs have proliferated the Web as fast as they have. Anyone can create a basic blog for free, and most of these toolsets have additional features available for a price. Here are just a few of the services available that would be most appropriate for educators seeking more effective collaboration:

Consumers of blogs, in this case, our educational stakeholders, have several ways that they can learn about new updates or additions to your blogs (e.g., see Feed 101, n.d.). First, they can periodically visit your blog and look for any updates which is easy to do since entries are listed in chronological order. Second, if your blog allows it, they can sign up to receive e-mail notification of any new information. Or, third, they can subscribe to the blog if the blog host offers RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed capability which is a basic feature of today’s blogs. In this case, you simply click on a link that designates “add to reader” or copy the website address of the feed into a feed reader (also known as feed aggregator). Anytime the blog is updated, you automatically receive a copy of it right in your reader.

According to Valesky & Sabella (2005), podcasting, in its basic form, involves creating audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) and making them available online in a way that allows users to automatically download the files for listening at their convenience (i.e., they subscribe to the podcast). After subscribing to the podcast, future broadcasts automatically download to your computer, which can then be transferred easily to a smart phone, tablet PC, or iPod. In essence, anyone with a computer, Internet access, free software, and a microphone can turn their computer into a personal studio and produce their very own radio show/program. School counselors and principals can collaboratively develop a podcast that provides vital information to all stake holders. Co-creating a podcast can be achieved by using free or almost free web-based podcasting services which greatly simplifies the process. Several popular web based podcasting services include:

Examples of school counselor and administrator podcasts include:

School counselors and administrators can use online web meetings to present information, share applications, train, and/or collaborate on projects with colleagues around the globe as easily as if they were side by side. Some online meeting services are free with limitations on the number of participants that can log in and others charge fees. With most online meeting services, you can schedule meetings in advance or start an instant meeting with the click of your mouse. Or, you might send invitations via email or instant messaging. Most services also allow you to speak to each other over the internet using VOIP or they may include a telephone number that participants can use to connect and conference. Following are several free or low-cost solutions for online meetings:

James Gaparino, principal at Pelican Marsh Elementary School in Naples Florida, lists ways his school and district use technology to facilitate meetings, make decisions, and communicate:

Imagine that a common productivity suite such as Microsoft Office™ was available to you online. And, what if users could log in and work together on one or more of the different aspects that a productivity suite offers such as creating documents, organizing a calendar, communicating with others, collecting and analyzing data, managing projects, etc. That is what online collaboration suites such as the following are designed to do:

37 Signals. http://www.com/ This online set of collaborative tools includes the following components:

Google Docs (http://docs.google.com). Well known for its search engine, Google also provides a free suite of online collaboration and productivity tools. Google docs allows users to choose who can access your documents, invite others to either edit or view your document, spreadsheet or presentation, and even view a presentation together. Also, you can save your documents and spreadsheets to your own computer in DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODT, PDF, RTF and HTML formats. And, Google docs allows easy publishing of documents online with one click, as normal-looking web pages, without having to learn anything new. You can publish to the entire world, just a few people or no one -- it's up to you. (You can also un-publish at any time.) Similarly, once you've created a document, you can post it to your blog. Following is a description of several of the many and various tools included in Google docs:

Microsoft Office Web Apps (http://www.live.com) has recently made available "Office Web Apps" which includes online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/). Similar to Google docs, Zoho is another popular suite of online collaboration tools. Most of Zoho's products are free or offered at a fraction of the cost of other similar products.

Sometimes, you don’t need a full collaboration suite because you simply want to get a group of people to pool their knowledge and create documents in the form of hyperlinked web pages. You probably want to create a wiki. A Wiki is a type of website that allows a group of people to add, remove, and sometimes edit the available content. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring such as with handbooks, group project reports, presentation handouts, etc.

Wikis are often used to create collaborative web sites and to power community web sites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Common wiki platforms, especially among educators, includes:

Getting feedback from others, conducting program or student assessment, and, in general, collecting information is part of a group process that is vital to effective group decision making, monitoring progress, and being accountable. Technology has made data collection incredibly easy and fast.

Polling. One counselor, Theresa, described how she is able to use the voting feature of her e-mail program to gain consensus on a particular purchase (Sabella & Stanley, 2008). She wrote:

"I had never used [Microsoft] Outlook in this fashion but I thought it might be useful. In one instance, I had a video tape called Bud and Dud on loan for a month from the company. Bud and Dud was a video series in which a dog gave tips for taking tests to students via 5-minute clips show during the morning announcements. The deadline for making a decision was quickly approaching and our school budget, like many, was very tight. We needed to decide if we should buy the program or send it back. Many of the students and teachers seemed to love it but one person was outspokenly against it. I wasn't sure if we should buy it because it was a “talking-dog-thing and seemed a little corny” – but I didn't want make the decision without more concrete feedback. So, I used the Microsoft Outlook voting feature which allows the user to send a survey-type messages with voting buttons to a group of recipients. By clicking a button, each respondent can express a preference and generate a response message to vote. Outlook logs vote messages to the original message's tracking page (visit http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=197420 for more details). The results were impressive. Over 95% of the respondents were in favor of purchasing and using the film. The principal saw the data and decided to purchase the program. The students and staff loved it and ask for it each and every year. Interestingly, the person that was originally against purchasing the program later told me that her students took a surprising liking to it. The Microsoft Outlook voting process was a simple feature that summarized the data in a matter of seconds. What would have required several hours otherwise only took seconds with this technology, a true positive impact on my productivity."

In addition to using Microsoft Outlook for conducting a poll, school counselors and administrators can use one or more of the following methods:

Accountability. Accountability can become a time consuming endeavor given the vast amount of available data and sometimes unfriendly software that currently exists to help make sense of it. However, more sophisticated student information systems (SIS) are now available to schools for making the accountability process much more manageable. Some school districts have even invested in developing from scratch the SIS they need. SIS software has grown in complexity, normally integrating into other systems such as communication, scheduling, grade book, discipline, accounting, and report writing.

Many forces have been converging from within the counseling profession, within educational practice, and from external sources in government over the past 10 or so years that have brought us to the necessity of incorporating accountability into school counseling practice as well (Isaacs, 2003). As a result, the school counseling profession has witnessed an increased number of available tools that are customized to more easily and quickly organize, interpret, and report data. For instance, Sabella (2009) described the following: