Distance Collaboration

I have had the pleasure of working with several people from across the state of Michigan on a professional development project for the 1:1 Institute.  We have used Moodle (for file upload, wiki, and chat), Ning, Skype, and email to collaborate over the past several weeks.   I found that I was able to closely connect with these folks using these on-line tools, something that I didn't think would be easy to do.  Now I feel even more strongly about the need to give our students more opportunities to use on-line communiation tools for educational purposes.