Exercises: Communication and teamwork tools

Match each situation with the most appropriate tool and justify your choice: (a) requesting formal information from the local council, (b) meeting up with friends for Saturday, (c) writing a piece of work among four people at the same time, and (d) presenting a project to a classmate who is sick at home.

Explain the differences between instant messaging and email: who usually reads each one, when a reply is expected, what tone is used, and how files are shared in each case.

The diagram compares two ways of working on the same document in a group of three people.

State which method you would choose for a group project and why, and point out a specific problem that can arise with the email attachments method.

An email has several parts: 'To', 'CC', 'Subject', 'Body text', and 'Attachments'. Explain what each part is used for and give reasons why there is a problem if the subject field is left blank or says only 'Hello'.

When replying to an email sent to multiple people, you can choose 'Reply' or 'Reply all'. Explain the difference and decide which you would use in each case: (a) confirming to the teacher that you received the homework, sent in an email to the whole class, and (b) providing a useful link in response to a question the teacher asked the whole group.

Explain the difference between a chat group, where everyone can post, and an announcements-only channel, where only the administrator can post. Which would you choose for official announcements from teachers to the class, and why?

Emojis help set the tone of messages, but they are not always appropriate. Classify these three messages as 'suitable' or 'unsuitable' and justify your answer: (a) a 'thank you 😊' in a group chat with friends, (b) an email to the headteacher with three laughing emojis, and (c) a 'good job 👍' in the group's shared document.

Explain what a shared calendar is and how an event invitation works (who creates it, who accepts it, what reminders there are). Give an example of how your class would use it to organise submission dates for the term.

In the group's shared document, someone accidentally deletes two paragraphs written by another person, and nobody notices until the next day. Explain what tools cloud documents offer to recover the lost text and what working guidelines would prevent this from happening again.

Your group has three weeks to do a project. Organise its communications: decide which channel you will use for each need (important decisions that must be recorded, quick day-to-day questions, final files, and catch-up meetings), and justify each choice.

A team video call fails: everyone talks at the same time, no one takes notes, and upon hanging up no one remembers what was decided. Propose rules of procedure for the next meeting and features of the tool itself that can help enforce them.

Shared documents support three permissions: view, comment, and edit. Explain what a person can do with each permission and assign the appropriate one in these cases: (a) the teacher reviews the draft, (b) your teammate works on the content, and (c) another group consults it as an example.

In the group's shared folder, everyone creates their own subfolders and there are three folders named 'photos'. Propose who should create the initial folder structure and how, what rule to follow to avoid duplication, and what to do with the duplicate folders that already exist.

A task board has three columns: 'To do', 'In progress', and 'Done'. Explain how you would organise the distribution of project work on it: what is written on each card, who moves the cards and when, and what advantage it has compared to assigning tasks only verbally.

You want to email the project video, which takes up $300\ \text{MB}$, and the attachment limit is $25\ \text{MB}$. Explain why trying to do so is not a good idea, what alternative cloud services offer (shared link), and what two things you should check about the link before sending it.

You need to retrieve a piece of information someone shared in the chat a month ago, and there are thousands of messages. Describe three search strategies (by person, by keyword, by date, or by shared file) and explain in what order you would apply them to find it quickly.

Design the complete 'digital toolkit' for a school working team: the tools you would use to communicate, to organise tasks, and to share files, along with the rules of use for each one. Justify why this set covers all needs without duplicating channels.

A group uses a messaging chat as the sole channel for the project: amidst jokes and photos, decisions, dates, and files get lost. Analyse why instant messaging fails as the only channel for a long project, and propose a mixed system, indicating what would be saved in each channel.

A group debates whether to work using their personal accounts or create new accounts specifically for the project. Evaluate the advantages and issues of each option (convenience, privacy, file ownership when the project ends) and recommend one of them with arguments.

After two weeks of working on the project, chaos erupts in your team: two members have duplicated the same task, nobody has bought the materials because "they didn't know whose turn it was", and you don't remember what dimensions were agreed upon for the scale model. Design a digital meeting minutes template that solves these problems at their root. Justify the fields you include to avoid each of the described mistakes, and show an example of how it would be filled out after a 15-minute meeting.

The school provides its own online tools, but the class prefers to use free external services. Analyse the differences regarding who stores the data, advertising, and terms of service, and establish three criteria to decide which tools are acceptable for school work.

Design the communication plan for the end-of-year school trip for three different audiences: families, teachers, and students. State which channel you would use with each group, how frequently, what type of messages would circulate through each channel, and how consent forms would be collected.

Marta and Sergio are editing the same Technology report offline from their homes. Marta deletes the "Budget" section to redo it later, and Sergio, at that very same time, expands that same section with new tables. Upon syncing with the cloud, the platform detects a version conflict. Predict what would happen if the system automatically applied the version with the most recent timestamp, explain why the cloud cannot merge both changes on its own, and design a teamwork protocol to prevent this problem from happening again.

In your class, five different apps are used to communicate: one for grades, another for tasks, another for announcements, and two chats. Analyse what problems this dispersion causes (unseen notices, doubts about where everything is) and propose simplifying to two tools, justifying what remains in each.