Hello and welcome back to Module Three of this eLearning course on digital skills.
Module Three is all about how to create digital resources and digital content.
And in part three of Module Three, we are going to be talking a little bit about how
do we collaborate online.
Collaborating online digitally is one of the most important skills that we can teach our
children and young people.
Not only is it great for peer assessment, but again, it’s also great for providing
audience for students’ work as well as assisting us with teaching of lesson plans and professional
development.
Collaborative writing is a process that enables students to generate ideas together, build
on each other’s contributions, provide peer feedback to one another, and demonstrate their
learning in new and creative ways.
There are a number of tools that can allow collaborative writing to take place.
But probably two of the most popular are Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365.
We’re going to have a little look at Google Apps for Education in some of these examples
here.
But some of the features in Office 365 are also very similar.
The great thing about a Google Doc is that it’s a little bit like a traditional Word
document but it’s on the Internet and therefore, it can be shared.
You can have up to 15 people in a Google Doc online, contributing to the document but also
contributing to the discussion.
It’s got lots of other built-in collaborative features as well.
For example, you can review the revision history to analyze how a piece of writing has been
built up over time.
You can also provide instant feedback to your students and provide other links to videos,
tools, games and quizzes for personalized individual learning by using the Comments
feature.
It’s got a great “Share” button at the top so again, you can share that with people
that you either want to be able to collaborate with or just to be able to view the document.
And one of the hidden gems of Google Docs is the Research tab.
This saves you time by actually being able to search and research on the Internet inside
the document itself as well as being able to find copyright-free images.
It’s a really really powerful resource.
In terms of providing peer support or teacher feedback, one of the other things that you
can do is you can generate Add-ons such as Kaizena.
The great thing about Kaizena is that you can actually leave voice feedback for your
students.
Now just think about how powerful that is.
They have to listen to the feedback, digest the feedback and then actually make changes
to the document.
Remember, you can check the document to see whether they’ve made those changes.
Here’s an example her of some young people using Google Docs in the Science classroom.
They’re actually doing a 21st century group work exercise where they’re working in groups
but one member of the group is on each of the different tables around the room.
It’s a great example about how you might simulate remote working in a one-to-one environment.
Of course, when we talk about one-to-one, it’s also important to remember that lots
of young people these days are not just using one device but they’re using two devices
in the classroom.
The second device in this case here, a mobile phone, provides a constant social feed which
can be used.
You will notice that the phones are encouraged to be out but they are also encouraged to
be face down unless a teacher asked them to be used.
One other nice feature of Google Docs is something called Draftback.
The Draftback, a Chrome extension, can be applied to a Google Doc and then you can see
it being retyped in real time.
It’s good for a couple of reasons.
One of the reasons it’s good is because you can see which members of the group contributed
to a document, so it’s a good way of assessing group work.
But it’s also very very good and very very easy to highlight straight away who is cut-and-pasting
to a document.
So, it’s a good built-in plagiarism checker as well.
I’ve talked a lot there about Google Docs or Word-processed documents.
But it’s not really just Google Docs.
There’s also Sheets, Slides and more.
Here’s a few examples.
In the collaborative slides mode, not only can you create PowerPoint-like presentations,
but again, you could also create class presentations.
For example, for a group presentation, each member of the class can be responsible for
completing two or three slides.
This avoids the problem of actually one person in the group doing all of the work and the
other people being passive observers.
In my class recently, I was doing some Internet safety and Responsible Use work and every
member of the class had their own slide and they had to see what they could find out about
this picture.
What I was able to do over time was I was able to actually go through then and see what
the class had found out and then replay the presentation for them.
For students that were struggling, they could look at other people’s slides to get some
kind of peer support.
So again, they were getting support from each other as well as support from me as the teacher.
We’ve also got Collaborative Sheets.
In this exercise here, we’ve spread some children around the town and they’re just
doing a simple traffic count exercise.
When they get back to the classroom, they all contribute into the same sheet in one
go, which allows us to create a larger data set for analysis.
The great thing about it, of course, is this could also be shared with other schools.
Other schools perhaps you’re twinned with across Europe.
One of my favorite lessons that I ever saw was this type of exercise where one group
of children were doing a traffic count and the other group of children, when they got
back to the computer lab, were doing a virtual traffic count using online web cameras of
Mumbai.
And again, web cameras are really really good ways for us to get data.
My favorite, I think, is the polar bear web cam in Churchill up in Canada.
Have a look at it and check it out and think about using web cams in your classroom.
They’re really really powerful agents for teaching and learning.
One other good feature of Google Docs is online forms.
You can use online forms for all sorts of things.
This is the example here from my school where we’ve created a pupil voice app.
Young people can just fill in the form and submit it to me and it automatically is put
into a spreadsheet.
In this example here, one of the members in the class has asked for better toilet facilities
in the schools, so, something for us to go away and have a look at now.
One other Chrome extension that you might also get for Google Docs is something called
Flubaroo.
This allows young people to submit answers via Google Forms, put it in self-marks and
e-mails.
Instantaneously, the results of the quiz back to the student.
It’s really really powerful once you’ve got it set up and will save you a huge amount
of time as a teacher for a summative assessment when you don’t want to see the working and
the thinking behind it.
Of course, there’s other collaborative tools as well.
ZeeMaps is of course, one of the tools that we’re using on this course and it’s great
to see how many people have registered and it’s great to see just how many people and
the spread of people that we’ve got, not just across Europe but also worldwide.
Once again, you’re all very very welcome.
Don’t forget, we can also use some of these tools for parent and community collaboration
as well.
Online tools help us build relationships.
They overcome geographical isolation for parents that don’t live together.
They cross cultural barriers via tools like Google Translate.
They help us share student achievements and they also help us to connect learning to the
real world.
There’s lots and lots of things is this.
But don’t forget, sometimes, its’ also very very good to use traditional media as
well as digital media.
If you really want to communicate with parents, it’s important that you take a blended approach
and use a little bit of both.
I hope you’ve enjoyed thinking about some of those things and thinking about collaborative
docs.
Why don’t you share with the other people how you might have used collaboration in the
classroom, not just for your own teacher planning, but also to get the best out of your pupils
from a learning and teaching perspective?
See you in the next video.