Pegby: Online Collaborative Peg Board/Organizational tool
What it is: Pegby is a neat online organizational tool that has fantastic customization features. With Pegby, students (and teachers) can share boards enabling them to collaborate with friends, family, coworkers and classmates. Pegby is organized by a series of columns, students can decide on the number and organization of columns. Columns can be easily expanded and collapsed so students can focus on exactly the columns they need at any given moment. Students (and teachers) can add cards to each column. The cards look just like a 3×5 note card and can include a title, content, tags, attachments, a due date and color coding. Note cards can be dragged from one column to the next, shared with others or added to a stack of cards. Students can filter all of their cards by tags to find exactly the cards they are looking for when they need them! Pegby lets you have multiple boards so you can organize life to your heart’s content. A Pegby board can be downloaded as a .yaml file (not familiar with that file extension, it is a unix executable file.)
How to integrate Pegby into the classroom: Pegby is one of those tools that I get totally geeked out about. I love the 3×5 note card look, the columns, the tagging, the associated calendar dates. A recipe for edu-love I tell ya! Pegby is a great tool for organizing your teacher self this year. Add ideas for the school year, tasks, lesson plans, to-do items, etc. to your board as cards. Create columns that make sense to you and organize to your heart’s content! Want one better? Share your board with colleagues so that you are all on the same page and can share lessons/resources/task responsibilities.
Older students can keep their school year organized by adding assignments, tasks, uploading work, taking/keeping notes and sharing their board with Pegby. As students work on and complete tasks, they can move items from one column to the next. Those unit tests won’t be a problem because they can tag pertinent information and easily study and review tagged information.
Pegby would also be a great tool for organizing research projects (even collaborative research projects). Students can decide how they want to organize their research and notes, tag information and attach documents. All of the research is in one place and tagged for easy reference when it comes time to compile the research. Pegby could be a useful tool for students attending college classes online.
Does your school use standards to keep track of learning? Why not create columns of Standards headings, and associate each standard with a note card? Students can upload any files or work associated with the standard. OR instead of making each column a standard heading, columns can be associated with mastery level of the standard. As a student moves through levels of mastery, they can move that standard card from one column to the next making stacks out of the standard subject. Students can keep track of their own learning, share their “Standards” board with teachers and parents.
Is your class collaborating with other classrooms? Create a collaboration board where all involved classes can organize a project together.
For younger students, create a class Pegby that can be accessed on an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer. The Pegby can be added to and organized as a whole class. Make Pegby updater one of your classroom jobs that happens first thing every morning. Each student will have the chance to be in control of the board throughout the year and all students will benefit from observing and helping organize the day. (Something we don’t model enough for kids in my humble opinion!)
Tips: Pegby does require a verified email account for access!
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Pegby in your classroom!
