Collaborating Online

Collaborating online is a very important skill that we must teach our students. Ollie points out that it is not only good for peer assessment but it is a good way for providing audience to our students. With this in mind Ollie defines "collaborative writing" as a process that enables student sto generate ideas together, build on each others contributions, provide peer feedback to one another and demonstrate their learning in a new creative ways.

There are a number of tools for collaborative writing. Ollie underlines that two of the most popular are: a) Google Apps for Education and b) Microsoft Office 365.

First we have a closer look at Google Apps for Education.

Google Docs

Google Docs has many similarities with a traditional Word Document. The difference is that it is on the internet and therefor can be shared. Up to fifty people can collaborate on a Google Doc, contributing to the document but also contributing to the discussion. There a a lot of other built in features.

• You can review the revision history
• You can provide instant feedback to your students
• You can provide other links to tools, games or quizzes
• You can improve individualised learning by using the "comments" feature.
• One of the "hidden gems" of Google Docs is the research tab, because you can save time, since you can search and research on the internet without leaving the Doc and you can find copyright free images
• You can work with  Addons like Kaizena in order to provide feedback. the grat thing about Kaizena is that you can leave voice feedbacks for your students. 

  

  feedback in Google Docs
  

  
  

  
  

  

  create conversations with Kaizena

• Another feature of google doc is a feature called draftback, which is a Chrome Extension and can be applied on Google Doc. You can see with draftback who ist typing in real time, so you know who really worked and how much on a project. It's easy to see who is copying andpasting into the document. So it can serve like a kind of plagiarism checker.
• Another good feature is online forms to collect information. Information is automatically saved on a spreadsheet
• Another interesting feature is easybib. With this feature you can keep a list of your sources in an organized way.
• Track Changes helps you keeping track of changes made to shared collaborative documents.

Google Sheets

You can create collaborative databases which you can also share with other schools. A Chrome Extension you can use with Google Sheets is flubaroo. Flubaroo helps you quickly grade and analyze online assignments and assessments, as well as email scores to students. It is a powerful tool on summative assessment.

Google Slides

You can create powerpoint presentations and class presentations. In the class presentation every student of the class creates one or two slides. In this way the students are working collaboratively 

Ollie conludes in pointing out the importance of communicating with the parents either in the traditional way or in the digital way.

Created with Padlet