I'm a little late to this conversation, but I really like Airtable and Trello for PM. Trello is a little less robust without investing in add-ons, but it has the friendliest UI.
The Story of Art Without Men was a great gift idea for my wife. I'd like to read it too at some point, but Im starting my MBA program at University of Florida this week.
Regarding Project Management: I use Asana for work stuff and it has broad ranging functionality as well as having templates and allowing for collaborators to be on tasks. It also sends you a daily to-do list which is extremely helpful and offers a range of views of projects and what stage they're in.
For writing group stuff: Discord is pretty robust all around as far as platforms go. You can have Events (and even see how many folks are interested in attending), and set up voice channels for folks to talk to each other. The functionality of Discord is pretty broad and server setup is pretty straightforward.
I regularly set up Discord servers for work and you'll want to have a set of community guidelines and the like, but basic server structure can be expanded or changed as needed to fit your class/community.
I've also seen setups where folks use Zoom along with Discord or another platform, ie Twitch for streaming and pair the two as needed depending on audience.
If you have questions about Discord setup, let me know and I can also send you some resources on setup and such. :)
Re. Project management: If your mind works well with nested lists (eg. 1, 2, 2a, 2b, 3...) as opposed to gantt charts or kanban (trello) boards, and you want something very low-impact and easy to share, you might try workflowy (https://workflowy.com/).
Basic plan is free, it works on Android/iOS and PC browsers, and it supports crazy-deep amounts of nesting. If your plan is steps 1-2-3, it'll do that. But if you feel the need to drill down to step 15.a.XI.(2).ii, it'll keep all those levels in order too.
I’m a project manager at a University. I use ClickUp for work and Asana for home. You should take a look at Monday.com. It’s similar to both ClickUp and Asana but less intense than ClickUp and more aesthetically pleasing than Asana (to me anyways).
My wife keeps in touch with a writer's group via a daily Zoom call, but given your thoughts about wanting to post assignments and keeping it low cost, I'd suggest Slack. It's online or app-based (both have the same functionality), has a free version, is super collaborative, and has the bonus of being asynchronous so while everyone *can* be "on" simultaneously, you can also have a more distributed/asyncrhonous/persistent conversation.
I'm not even going to start with the Project Management software. I've used over a dozen packages for work, none of which has been a perfect fit, and all of which have been mandated by my employer at the time.
Software: I really love Asana and I've used it for a long time. I've just started using Notion, which I like for similar reasons to Asana, but I've had to find templates that work best for that. Asana has most of the basics built in. I've used Asana in teams and I liked it more than Trello because it was more date based and I like having what needs to happen for the day right in front of my face. I've used it for the last year to track freelance projects/life stuff.
Asana also has an iPhone widget, so I can have a screen that shows if the tasks for that day are accomplished or if there's still something I need to work on (or move to another day, as it were).
Notion has a lot of folks out there who've made templates you can adjust/adapt to your own style, and add teams to, so that may be worth checking into.
Classes: I've taken Scott Snyder and Bendis comic classes on Substack. Both have accompanying discords and use Zoom meetings, and the discords are nice because Scott's actually has a menu with links to all the classes, so if I've fallen behind, they're easy to find. It also allows for students to discuss things, but does require some moderation/ground rules. Discord does have some events stuff, where "meetings" could be held in discord itself, rather than Zoom. I do feel like Zoom has more functionality for live classes, though.
A) I adore Trello, though I don't use it collaboratively. I use it for keeping texts and images about art history and printmaking (it holds large document and image files, even free), I have another board for my garden, and I have a few boards for RP.
B) For teaching, all you might need is Discord. I've done about 2 years of online teaching, and I've used Google Classroom (hate), Canvas (via a university and the free teacher version--it's good, but feels outdated and clunky), and Discord integrated with Zoom lectures/discussion (though you can also stream directly from Discord, I've found it can be hit or miss for students). If you set up a community server (free), you have the ability to later add a subscription model. Discord allows video and voice streaming, has a good file upload size, allows you to make unlimited channels and categories, allows you to set the interaction to either a forum style or threaded secquential posts, and with Nitro (paid version) allows you higher bandwith speeds for streaming and even larger file upload sizes. The base text/character count is also very high, and even higher for Nitro. I prefer it as a computer app, but it also works in a browser and via mobile app, all of which immediately synchronize. Zoom isn't really functional for teaching unless you use the paid version (host only, students can be on free version), because the hard limit for hosting otherwise is an hour, and those of us who do *short* poorly cannot abide a mere hour's limit. WebEx is a decent alternative to Zoom, and I used it with one university, but don't have enough experience with it to tell you much more than that it is free: basically it worked well and it's free.
I can talk with you about teaching online, and if you want, I can give you a link to my community Discord server (Kathleen Hudspeth Studio--invite only) so you can check it out, which I have set up with the future goal for online teaching and subscriptions, but which for now is where I post new work and engage directly with friends/fans/colleagues. You have my email; let me know! <3
I work with students as an executive function coach, so I have tried and tested a LOT of phone-compatible apps. The best one that fits your criteria (except for printing, not sure about that) is Taskade.
You are a very busy writer person indeed! I can't get into podcasts, I don't really know why. I feel like they amble around for 90 minutes when I want to get to the point and go add another song to my new Spotify playlist (I'm paying for it now, Spotify is good). Anyway, I will try Semantle and Knotwords, because I was a game designer, and I am honor bound to do so. I don't play Wordle anymore since I had five guesses on a word like *ANCY and there were like seven possibles.
Regarding the online writing class: I've taken a lot, on a bunch of different platforms, but the best that's worked for me as a somewhat-poor and not-exactly-tech-savvy student was Nino Cipri's 4-week Horror Writing class. We met every Saturday as a group on Zoom, but assignments and homework and resources and videos and links were through Google Classroom. I can't speak to its ease from a teacher perspective, but as a student, it was nice to not have to sign up for, buy, or learn another app or software.
Has anyone recommended Trello for project management? It can do everything you've listed above, but I've not yet tried to print from it, so I can't speak to that. I especially love that tasks can be assigned, and comment threads are kept on the task "cards" so it's easy to follow developing ideas and thoughts.
For project management, I've seen Basecamp used very well (and also poorly when it's organized badly). I worked with a firm where we were able to separate content revisions to be seen by the team only and then were able to share specific items in the software with clients. It integrates milestones and you can assign tasks and get notifications on task due dates. I'm not sure how easy it is to print from. $15 a month and has the option to invite guests (which it distinguishes from employees somehow). I hate Teams for project management. It is so hard to find files and navigate to milestones. I've uploaded content to check off milestones and it turns out it doesn't show up in the main files. But in terms of a class, Teams might actually work. You can record conversations and they live in the team thread. You can make separate team groups. And you can add files in a central location. I just don't find it great for complex delegation and file organization.
Based off what you say are your needs for the Writing for Dancers course; Microsoft Teams strikes me as the best solution. It is what we mostly use at my university rather than Zoom (mostly because it is bundled into the Microsoft Office package they have already), in terms of video conferencing it basically matches all the features of Zoom with some quirks (like in break out rooms, the meeting's host has automatic access to any of the break out room's text chat, so I need to warn my students beforehand that if they want to shittalk me they should do it over the breakout rooms videochat instead).
Where I think Teams is superior to Zoom for education, is that you can use the system as a kind of hub outside of videoconferencing. You can create separate channels for discussions or projects similar to Slack channels. There's also the ability to host files for reading materials or use the cloud based Office applications to host Word docs or create live documents for multiple people to work on simultaneously.
It is generally accessible from a cost perspective- as Teams is bundled into an Office 365 subscription which the majority of people with laptops are going to have anyway (if any of your students are also currently studying at a University, they'd likely have free access to Office as part of their student account as well).
Idea of the course sounds very cool, I hope you are able to get it off the ground. If you end up expanding the course - I have a dancer friend in Miami (she actually auditioned for Awakenings when she was based in Vegas) that I can recommend it to.
You may want to give Smartsheet a try. You can do some basic things with a free account, so you can find out if it might jive with your brain. It's more utilitarian than aesthetic, but it hits all of your buttons. It's a souped-up spreadsheet (and I feel like I think in spreadsheets).
You can do a basic sheet ("grid"), a Gantt chart, a card view (like unto Trello or other similar tools), and a calendar view—and each sheet can be viewed each way, with one set as default. There is nesting and collapsing; there is conditional formatting. You can build dashboard views so you get high-level summary information that stays up-to-date. If you had one Sheet per writing project, for example, you could build a Writing dashboard that pulls upcoming deadlines, statuses, etc. from the individual sheets so you have a 40-ft view.
You can assign tasks to various folks (and set up rules so that assigned people are notified at particular intervals or when particular things happen). You can publish read-only versions of Sheets so you can share them publicly outside the software, or you can share it with others who have accounts (free accounts let you do basic things, so it's not a major barrier to collaboration with external folks). It can store links and files. It integrates with Google Drive, OneDrive, Evernote, Dropbox, and others. I personally find it a great way to aggregate information that lives in various places. You can print, and you can export to PDF or Excel.
There are a lot of ways to use it, so it might lean too flexible, but you also aren't required to engage with them if you don't want. It can simply be a workhorse of a spreadsheet with the functionality you need. If you want to learn every possible bell and whistle, there will be a learning curve, but again—it's what you need it to be. So that's my suggestion!
I'm a little late to this conversation, but I really like Airtable and Trello for PM. Trello is a little less robust without investing in add-ons, but it has the friendliest UI.
The Story of Art Without Men was a great gift idea for my wife. I'd like to read it too at some point, but Im starting my MBA program at University of Florida this week.
Regarding Project Management: I use Asana for work stuff and it has broad ranging functionality as well as having templates and allowing for collaborators to be on tasks. It also sends you a daily to-do list which is extremely helpful and offers a range of views of projects and what stage they're in.
For writing group stuff: Discord is pretty robust all around as far as platforms go. You can have Events (and even see how many folks are interested in attending), and set up voice channels for folks to talk to each other. The functionality of Discord is pretty broad and server setup is pretty straightforward.
I regularly set up Discord servers for work and you'll want to have a set of community guidelines and the like, but basic server structure can be expanded or changed as needed to fit your class/community.
I've also seen setups where folks use Zoom along with Discord or another platform, ie Twitch for streaming and pair the two as needed depending on audience.
If you have questions about Discord setup, let me know and I can also send you some resources on setup and such. :)
Project management - Jira.
I initially thought only enterprise businesses use it but there's a monthly subscription version for up to 10 users.
Re. Project management: If your mind works well with nested lists (eg. 1, 2, 2a, 2b, 3...) as opposed to gantt charts or kanban (trello) boards, and you want something very low-impact and easy to share, you might try workflowy (https://workflowy.com/).
Basic plan is free, it works on Android/iOS and PC browsers, and it supports crazy-deep amounts of nesting. If your plan is steps 1-2-3, it'll do that. But if you feel the need to drill down to step 15.a.XI.(2).ii, it'll keep all those levels in order too.
I’m a project manager at a University. I use ClickUp for work and Asana for home. You should take a look at Monday.com. It’s similar to both ClickUp and Asana but less intense than ClickUp and more aesthetically pleasing than Asana (to me anyways).
My wife keeps in touch with a writer's group via a daily Zoom call, but given your thoughts about wanting to post assignments and keeping it low cost, I'd suggest Slack. It's online or app-based (both have the same functionality), has a free version, is super collaborative, and has the bonus of being asynchronous so while everyone *can* be "on" simultaneously, you can also have a more distributed/asyncrhonous/persistent conversation.
I'm not even going to start with the Project Management software. I've used over a dozen packages for work, none of which has been a perfect fit, and all of which have been mandated by my employer at the time.
Software: I really love Asana and I've used it for a long time. I've just started using Notion, which I like for similar reasons to Asana, but I've had to find templates that work best for that. Asana has most of the basics built in. I've used Asana in teams and I liked it more than Trello because it was more date based and I like having what needs to happen for the day right in front of my face. I've used it for the last year to track freelance projects/life stuff.
Asana also has an iPhone widget, so I can have a screen that shows if the tasks for that day are accomplished or if there's still something I need to work on (or move to another day, as it were).
Notion has a lot of folks out there who've made templates you can adjust/adapt to your own style, and add teams to, so that may be worth checking into.
Classes: I've taken Scott Snyder and Bendis comic classes on Substack. Both have accompanying discords and use Zoom meetings, and the discords are nice because Scott's actually has a menu with links to all the classes, so if I've fallen behind, they're easy to find. It also allows for students to discuss things, but does require some moderation/ground rules. Discord does have some events stuff, where "meetings" could be held in discord itself, rather than Zoom. I do feel like Zoom has more functionality for live classes, though.
A) I adore Trello, though I don't use it collaboratively. I use it for keeping texts and images about art history and printmaking (it holds large document and image files, even free), I have another board for my garden, and I have a few boards for RP.
B) For teaching, all you might need is Discord. I've done about 2 years of online teaching, and I've used Google Classroom (hate), Canvas (via a university and the free teacher version--it's good, but feels outdated and clunky), and Discord integrated with Zoom lectures/discussion (though you can also stream directly from Discord, I've found it can be hit or miss for students). If you set up a community server (free), you have the ability to later add a subscription model. Discord allows video and voice streaming, has a good file upload size, allows you to make unlimited channels and categories, allows you to set the interaction to either a forum style or threaded secquential posts, and with Nitro (paid version) allows you higher bandwith speeds for streaming and even larger file upload sizes. The base text/character count is also very high, and even higher for Nitro. I prefer it as a computer app, but it also works in a browser and via mobile app, all of which immediately synchronize. Zoom isn't really functional for teaching unless you use the paid version (host only, students can be on free version), because the hard limit for hosting otherwise is an hour, and those of us who do *short* poorly cannot abide a mere hour's limit. WebEx is a decent alternative to Zoom, and I used it with one university, but don't have enough experience with it to tell you much more than that it is free: basically it worked well and it's free.
I can talk with you about teaching online, and if you want, I can give you a link to my community Discord server (Kathleen Hudspeth Studio--invite only) so you can check it out, which I have set up with the future goal for online teaching and subscriptions, but which for now is where I post new work and engage directly with friends/fans/colleagues. You have my email; let me know! <3
I work with students as an executive function coach, so I have tried and tested a LOT of phone-compatible apps. The best one that fits your criteria (except for printing, not sure about that) is Taskade.
You are a very busy writer person indeed! I can't get into podcasts, I don't really know why. I feel like they amble around for 90 minutes when I want to get to the point and go add another song to my new Spotify playlist (I'm paying for it now, Spotify is good). Anyway, I will try Semantle and Knotwords, because I was a game designer, and I am honor bound to do so. I don't play Wordle anymore since I had five guesses on a word like *ANCY and there were like seven possibles.
Regarding the online writing class: I've taken a lot, on a bunch of different platforms, but the best that's worked for me as a somewhat-poor and not-exactly-tech-savvy student was Nino Cipri's 4-week Horror Writing class. We met every Saturday as a group on Zoom, but assignments and homework and resources and videos and links were through Google Classroom. I can't speak to its ease from a teacher perspective, but as a student, it was nice to not have to sign up for, buy, or learn another app or software.
Has anyone recommended Trello for project management? It can do everything you've listed above, but I've not yet tried to print from it, so I can't speak to that. I especially love that tasks can be assigned, and comment threads are kept on the task "cards" so it's easy to follow developing ideas and thoughts.
For project management, I've seen Basecamp used very well (and also poorly when it's organized badly). I worked with a firm where we were able to separate content revisions to be seen by the team only and then were able to share specific items in the software with clients. It integrates milestones and you can assign tasks and get notifications on task due dates. I'm not sure how easy it is to print from. $15 a month and has the option to invite guests (which it distinguishes from employees somehow). I hate Teams for project management. It is so hard to find files and navigate to milestones. I've uploaded content to check off milestones and it turns out it doesn't show up in the main files. But in terms of a class, Teams might actually work. You can record conversations and they live in the team thread. You can make separate team groups. And you can add files in a central location. I just don't find it great for complex delegation and file organization.
Based off what you say are your needs for the Writing for Dancers course; Microsoft Teams strikes me as the best solution. It is what we mostly use at my university rather than Zoom (mostly because it is bundled into the Microsoft Office package they have already), in terms of video conferencing it basically matches all the features of Zoom with some quirks (like in break out rooms, the meeting's host has automatic access to any of the break out room's text chat, so I need to warn my students beforehand that if they want to shittalk me they should do it over the breakout rooms videochat instead).
Where I think Teams is superior to Zoom for education, is that you can use the system as a kind of hub outside of videoconferencing. You can create separate channels for discussions or projects similar to Slack channels. There's also the ability to host files for reading materials or use the cloud based Office applications to host Word docs or create live documents for multiple people to work on simultaneously.
It is generally accessible from a cost perspective- as Teams is bundled into an Office 365 subscription which the majority of people with laptops are going to have anyway (if any of your students are also currently studying at a University, they'd likely have free access to Office as part of their student account as well).
Idea of the course sounds very cool, I hope you are able to get it off the ground. If you end up expanding the course - I have a dancer friend in Miami (she actually auditioned for Awakenings when she was based in Vegas) that I can recommend it to.
You may want to give Smartsheet a try. You can do some basic things with a free account, so you can find out if it might jive with your brain. It's more utilitarian than aesthetic, but it hits all of your buttons. It's a souped-up spreadsheet (and I feel like I think in spreadsheets).
You can do a basic sheet ("grid"), a Gantt chart, a card view (like unto Trello or other similar tools), and a calendar view—and each sheet can be viewed each way, with one set as default. There is nesting and collapsing; there is conditional formatting. You can build dashboard views so you get high-level summary information that stays up-to-date. If you had one Sheet per writing project, for example, you could build a Writing dashboard that pulls upcoming deadlines, statuses, etc. from the individual sheets so you have a 40-ft view.
You can assign tasks to various folks (and set up rules so that assigned people are notified at particular intervals or when particular things happen). You can publish read-only versions of Sheets so you can share them publicly outside the software, or you can share it with others who have accounts (free accounts let you do basic things, so it's not a major barrier to collaboration with external folks). It can store links and files. It integrates with Google Drive, OneDrive, Evernote, Dropbox, and others. I personally find it a great way to aggregate information that lives in various places. You can print, and you can export to PDF or Excel.
There are a lot of ways to use it, so it might lean too flexible, but you also aren't required to engage with them if you don't want. It can simply be a workhorse of a spreadsheet with the functionality you need. If you want to learn every possible bell and whistle, there will be a learning curve, but again—it's what you need it to be. So that's my suggestion!