Mightybell: Using spaces for collaboration

I received an email from Library 2.0 with an invitation to a chat with a woman named Gina Bianchini who co-developed Ning and also a new site called Mightybell.  I was instantly curious.  I checked it out and was drawn to the concept.    It reminded me a lot of Pinterest, but in a much more organized way.  I saw a similarity to Wallwisher and linio.it as well.   

The concept is newer to me, but useful.   Once creates a space, invites people to visit and those people can tag items to the space.  The options and the postings are vast, videos, links, posts, images and files.  And an even cooler part, the participants can CHAT! 

There are so many possibilities for the classrooms.  I invited my French three/ four students immediately and decided we are going to use the site as a platform to expand our skills.  I am going to start posting images to prompt their conversation and attempt to post videos. (When I say attempt, I mean, post videos kids can watch.  Our school blocks video right now, except for school tube and united streaming.)  

I wasn’t able to add my audio Dropboxes to the site.  They are embeddable. If I want to use them, I have to send the kids to my school website or to Edmodo, but organizing the items into one space is an awesome concept.    

I like to use sites like wallwisher, simplemeet and linio because they are easy and kids can do peer edits.  This site has a little bit of everything.  I can see a district using it for PD, a department using it for PLN development and collaboration. Teachers can use it for group work and projects.  It is good for PBL because you can create spaces for specific groups, act as the moderator and invite specific students and monitor their collaboration.  You can have numerous spaces at once and you can make them private or public.

I am very excited to explore this site and discover the limitless possibilities to use it in my classroom.