If you are conducting supervision or consultation at a distance, you are going to have a LOT of electronic files and a lot of electronic communication to deal with. There are a few ways you can handle this, and email and whatever you use now for a filing system on your computer can work for most of it, but at minimum you are going to need a way to send or share large (i.e. video) files. There are a number of services that allow free sending of fairly large files (such as YouSendIt), and sending of very large files for a subscription fee. If your clients are using a Flip video camera, they can set up a private flip sharing site, which has the added benefit of not cluttering up your hard drive with a ton of video files that you keep meaning to remove. You can also set up a MobileMe iDisk or a DropBox shared folder as a space for your clients to upload video and other files to, with separate folders for each client to maintain security. If you don’t have a lot of clients and are diligent about deleting (or asking clients to delete) video files, you probably could even get away with the free version of DropBox.

But if you do a lot of distance work – either supervision or straight client consultation, you will get a lot of organizational headache-saving bang for your buck with a service that creates more of a virtual office space. As mentioned in my previous post, Acrobat can provide you with “work spaces”, where your clients can upload video and documents, and an obvious benefit of this service if you also use Adobe Connect is that you can then have a somewhat integrated service for both your files and your meetings (I think! I haven’t actually used either of these services). My recommendation though, especially if you are willing to pay for a virtual office space/file repository, is to use BaseCamp for everything except meetings (for which I would use Skype or iChat).

The free version of BaseCamp will give you the ability to have separate “projects” for each client (since BaseCamp is at heart a project management tool, that is the terminology they use). Each project space has a file sharing area, to-do list capabilities, a message area, a calendar for major milestones/deadlines, and a “writeboard” — exactly like it sounds, basically a whiteboard space for text, on which you and your client can each write notes. I use the writeboard for commenting on my clients’ self-evaluations/notes and videos as I am watching video, rather than exchanging individual documents/files. My motive is to have as few files hanging around to manage as possible, and as little information coming into my email inbox as possible, and so I have my clients use basecamp for pretty much everything except urgent messages (like needing to reschedule, or a particularly urgent case question).

It is with the subscription version that BaseCamp really comes into its own for supervision and consultation, because with the paid version, you get the ability to track time on a project. I track my supervision time here, and my clients track their fieldwork hours here. It’s easy to generate reports and get an instant summary of hours completed, and I have a good check on the hours clients are counting as experience. A time tracking widget for BaseCamp makes it even easier. And yes, there’s an app for that too. Even better, there are several online invoicing applications (I use FreshBooks) that will import time from BaseCamp projects to generate your invoices. I figure the time I save on keeping track of hours and generating  and tracking invoices more than makes up for the cost of both these services.

So, here’s the bottom line on my recommendations for using technology in distance supervision:

Please comment with your suggestions and experiences, as well as questions!