a collaboration tool

Actilablang is meant for teachers of the same school or university, or colleagues from different schools to work together on teaching scenarios and to share their preparations.

Teachers can entrust their agenda code(s) to anyone wishing to borrow, share, edit or enrich their preparations. They may also build banks of reference documents, lexicons and grammars to be used by their colleagues.

Teachers can also share in the follow-up of students' work, and ask assistants to help them monitor the work of large groups.

Students can exchange the notes that they have written in their notepads with fellow-students, and they can edit them, provided they give them a password. They can also share documents and exercises with their mates, and invite them to share their synchronous virtual whiteboard and participate in video conferences.

The documents that they produce and store in their file-box can also be proposed as reference documents for their own class (and/or others) after validation by their teacher. The teacher can also choose to show them in class on a video-projector for collective correction or improvement, or simply as a document to be studied collectively and possibly converted into a reference document at a click of the mouse.

Online collaboration can also be carried out via e-mails, video e-mails, automatic connection to online virtual whiteboards, and private/public video chatrooms:

The use of online whiteboards allows users to modify a document online. Any change will appear instantly on all the screens of the connected  users. Students and teachers can know at any time which of the students in their group are presently connected and send them an alarm asking them either to log on to the whiteboard or to the chatroom shared by the group (maximum 6 users at a time for better efficiency). As many as 5 whiteboards can be created for each group, the teacher can attribute one board to a whole class or split the class into as many as 5 groups, each using a different whiteboard. Each student now has a chatroom and a  whiteboard of his/her, that he/she can share with classmates to be selected in a list. Invitations to join in for collaborative work can be sent by instant message for those currently using Actilablang, or by automatic e-mail, or both.

Collaboration is mostly achieved through links to free collaborative sites or test sites like Mailvu.com, free online dictionaries like Wordreference, Reverso, Linguee, Appear-in for the videoconferencing device, the interactive notepad (Framapad) provided by Framasoft, the  text-to-speech test modules: Audiopal and Acapela and other useful tools like Wikipedia, Google, Google docs.We are very grateful for their offering free - if sometimes limited - access and do hope that they will keep doing so.