Build Effective Teamwork with Trello

Easter

How are you doing in the middle of the semester? We hope that you can have a nice holiday during the Easter break. This month we are planning to introduce a very nice teamwork management tool for both teachers and students.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool which is widely used in Agile development. It is web-based and you don't have to install any software on your device. We have found that this visual collaboration tool is very useful for teamwork and project management.

It uses the kanban paradigm for managing projects. If you are familiar with the concept of lean production, you would know it was widely used by Toyota as part of its lean production, which is the secret for them to produce top quality cars with minimum cost and gains one of the top profit rates in the automotive industry.


Trello will be able to help your team to keep track of everything, end the endless email chains, organise things together, always stay in sync, and collaborate more effectively with clarity.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Well designed and it makes the team collaboration really easily
2. It has a free basic version and it is good enough
3. There are plenty of examples online to inspire your use
4. iOS and Android versions for mobile devices
5. The contents are mobile friendly.
6. Very easy to use and the learning curve is minimum
7. It can also be used to manage your daily tasks

What is not so good?

I think that one of the issues is that the single sign on function is not there and we cannot log in with our Monash Google accounts. Also, people might think it is too much trouble to use a new online tool to coordinate a small team project even it might be helpful.

What's in it for us?

As Mahara is still on trial, our students normally use Google Doc or just Facebook groups to coordinate their group assignments. They can use Trello for this purpose and it does a great job. You can also use it similarly for coordinating the work with your tutors and co-lecturers in your unit.

Or you can use it to plan your lesson:

Or plan a project based learning activity for the students:

There are many inspiring ways to use Trello. If you are interested, you can find more examples at: https://trello.com/inspiration.