Planning can be more fun and effective when you work with fellow educators. Here we will discuss how to add collaborators to your CMAP and provide an overview of the collaboration tools.
Before you begin, ensure that your prospective collaborators have an iCPALMS account and that they are willing to collaborate on your CMAP.
To get started, click the Manage Users icon at the bottom of the screen.
Click Add User in the pop-up.
Enter the name or email address of a person you want as a collaborator.
Click on their name or image to select them and click Add to enter them into the list of Collaboration Users.
As the owner of the CMAP, you can grant privileges to your collaborators by clicking the checkboxes next to their names.
After your collaborators have been added, let them know that the course will appear in their My Planner dashboard, under the Collaborative Maps tab, and that collaborative maps will have a darker blue background.
When a user first opens a Collaborative CMAP, they will see a pop-up that explains how saving works while collaborating.
- First, the CMAP auto saves every minute while users are collaborating. Collaborators may need to wait, or in some cases, refresh the browser to see the latest changes.
- Second, the manual save option is only available to the person who opened or joined the current collaboration session first. And if that person leaves the session, the save option passes to the person with edit privileges who signed on next.
CMAP gives you the freedom to choose who your collaborators will be and how you want to work.
- One idea is to have the collaborators work on planning the same class session, with one teacher reviewing and selecting student resources while the other selects teacher resources.
- Another idea is to have each collaborator fully plan different units, weeks, or days of instruction.
Each collaborator can sync the entire map with their school calendar using the CSchedule tool, even if their calendars are different. So while session 106 occurs on February 4th for me, it might occur on February 11th for my collaborator if their school started a week later than mine.
CMAP offers many tools designed to help collaborators work together more effectively.
- At the bottom of the screen, next to the Manage Users icon, you will see an icon for each collaboration user who is currently logged into the session. Hovering over their icon, displays their name and connection status.
- Clicking the Chat tool opens the Messages dialog, allowing you to communicate in real-time with your fellow collaborators during the session. To close the Messages dialog, just click the Chat icon again.
CMAP also allows you to draw annotations directly on the map.
- Clicking the Quick Draw tool allows you to make markings that automatically disappear after a short time.
- Clicking the “regular” Draw tool makes marks that can only be removed by clicking the Clear Drawing icon.
The History log, keeps a record of changes, and it allows you to undo and redo changes or to revert to a previous version of the map from the current collaboration session.
Finally, each collaborator can create a personal copy of any collaborative map by clicking the Share, Export & Import tab, selecting the Export to .cmap option, creating a new class, and selecting the Importing option in the new class.
We hope that CMAP collaboration enhances your planning experience.
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