Technologies

Communication is quite possibly the most important tool that we have in our lives, and plays a tremendous role in successfully being able to work in the classroom environment in our learning teams. From my own personal experience, I have found that we typically do the vast majority of communicating for school in the Main forum online classroom and our learning team chat forums. However, this sometimes is not enough because a team members’ Internet is broken or something happens in their personal lives. When these instances come up, it is vital to use alternate forms of communication. The two most important technologies for the team to use would definitely be e-mail and making phone calls.

The first sign that emailing is such an important form of communication within learning teams is the fact that there is a place for it on the charter. The biggest advantage to e-mail, is that every single person on the team has an address. If they do not have a personal one, the University of Phoenix will provide them with one. E-mail has become a universal way of communicating worldwide. According to Emailmarketingreports.com (Bronlow, Mark), “In October 2007, an official Yahoo! blog suggested Yahoo represented 255 million of the world’s 543 million webmail accounts” (2010). Since that time, the number of webmail accounts has increased to roughly 1.3 billion. E-mail is not only accessible on the computer, but is now available through telephones, iPods, and iPod’s as well, making it even more appealing. Another appeal to e-mail with regards to learning team communication is that one letter can be sent to the entire group. There is also a reply all option so that all team members are able to see all information.

Using the telephone is another important technology for communicating within the group. The telephone can be used in several different ways including calls between two people, conference calls with the entire group or multiple members of the team, and/or sending text...