Wimba Pronto

I just recently signed up to use one of the free basic collaborative services that are now offered through Blackboard. It’s called Wimba Pronto. What I like about this service is the fact that I can meet students online unexpectedly and in a casual way. It’s a little like meeting the students ‘in the hallway’ in a face to face environment.

I don’t know about you, but particularly with my new online learners, they tend not to read all the directions and often don’t understand where to post assignments. For instance: just the other night, I had a student, who for the second time during the same week, posted her discussion response in the dropbox as an attachment. I wrote to her via email twice telling her where to post the discussion and reviewed with her the use of the dropbox. Well, she either didn’t ‘get it’ or possibly didn’t read her email. I saw that she was ‘online’ the other night and I made a point of contacting her again to discuss the uses of the discussion board vs. the dropbox. Now, she is much clearer on what to do.

As with many levels of technology tools available today, there is the free basic version of Pronto, but there is also a paid upgraded version. My suggestion to any school looking into this tool is to first make the ‘free’ version available. And, believe me, that version is really quite all encompassing (especially for free!). Give the instructors a chance to use this tool and then let them 'beg for more'!

Another really great use of Pronto is providing students with a forum for collaborating with classmates. This may be to simply seek assistance with something in the course or to actually work on a group project.

In addition, instructors can use Pronto for virtual office hours, as well. There are certainly many such tools available today, but what is nice about this tool is that it is connected to Blackboard. I would suspect that before too long, Pronto might offer this tool with other learning management systems, too.