Web 2.0 App: Gliffy.com

I am WAY out of my comfort zone here, but I wanted to review something I was totally unfamiliar with.

What is Gliffy?

• Gliffy is an online diagramming program.  You can use it to create, share, and collaborate on floorplans, diagrams, flowcharts, etc.  With a free subscription, you can produce 5 files that you can share publically.  You can upload your own images if you’d like to.
• For Academic subscriptions with team collaboration ability, costs range from $12.50 per month for 10 users and up to $875 for 1000 users.
• You Tube Demo of Gliffy  (7.25 mins.)

Setting Up an Account

Setting up a Gliffy account took me no time at all. We’re working on renovating a little shed to store our canoes and kayaks, so I started “drawing” without reading any documentation. Within a half hour I had “dragged” walls, windows, doors, stairs, etc. to my floorplan and had a crude concept online to “publish.” I'm quite embarrassed to show you my work, but here goes (You'll have to set up your own Gliffy account to view): http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/#d=1444529&t=Boat_House

Gliffy also provides code so you can share images of what you develop in Gliffy in a Wiki. So here's what I came up with. Pretty crude, but not bad for the amount of time I spent on it so far.

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Use in Higher Education

I am not a design or architecture professor, so bare with me.  This program does not covert things to 3-D and I’m not sure it would be useful for these types of students, as they probably have easy access to much more robust software.

For my nutrition students, they could possibly collaborate using Gliffy to design a floorplan for a virtual health fair, a flow chart to route people to nutrition services at a local or state health agency, or to develop a concept map about a nutrition science topic. 

Professionally, I’d like to make a site map to show students the navigation connections in my online courses and perhaps Gliffy might be useful for that.

Here’s an example of the use of Gliffy in academia, a flow chart of an Academic Dishonesty Process. As you can see these Gliffy pages can look very polished.

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