When I’m teaching, one of the things I can’t stand is having a student or more that is not participating, contributing, or taking part in the class. So I’m going to show you five tools that I use to ensure that all my students are contributing and collaborating in the classroom.
Now why have students collaborate on activities in class? Why not just have every student do every task individually? Well, the benefits of collaborative work between students are three-fold; academic, psychological, and social.
Academic as it promotes students’ critical thinking, the students are now actively taking a role in the learning process which then motivates them to get better marks in assessment in class. Psychological as it improves student self-esteem. It also reduces anxiety between students as they are constantly cooperating on a task, and I think it develops a positive attitude towards the teacher, I hope. And social, students need to use a variety of interaction skills during any collaborative tasks, and this also develops positive relationships between the students. When working together, students have an opportunity to hear all the diversity of opinions that there might be on any topic in the classroom, and this is really important for them as well.
Canva
So let’s take a look at the first collaborative tool that I use online and face to face, which is Canva. To begin collaborating on any design in Canva, just go to share at the top here. Make sure that share a link to edit is selected. Copy the link and share that between the students that are working on the same design. Canva also allows you to create a team, so if you find yourself using Canva a lot in class, you can ask your students to create a team on Canva by clicking here. Once the link has been successfully shared with the other students, their names will pop up in the top right here. The students will need to make an account, though because if you try to access a design without one, you’ll see this message. Now the last time I used Canva with my students was because in a few weeks we were going to do a restaurant role play in the class, and I wanted students to really get engaged with the activity. So I put them in groups and I asked them to create a restaurant name, a logo for the restaurant, a menu for the restaurant, and also job vacancies for the position of chef and waiter. Doing this, I saw a big improvement in the students’ engagement with the task.
Padlet
Now the second one is Padlet. Before I show you this amazing idea I’ve got for you, it’s really important that when you are sharing this with the students or between the students, you click share, change the privacy to can edit. An activity I love doing with Padlet is using a map and having my students plan a holiday in a certain country. I set them a budget, and they have to plan a week’s holiday in a country identifying the places and the things they do on this holiday, and also they can link to websites that provide information on the holiday itself.
Wakelet
The third one is Wakelet. After your students have started a collection on Wakelet, they can invite each other to collaborate by clicking on invite and copying the link and sending it either directly to each other using a QR code or copying this code right here. When the students use the link or the code, they do need to give a name but they don’t need to make an account. Now the best thing I did with this platform with my students was assign them into groups and assign them a personality or famous person that they needed to explain to another group. So what they did with Wakelet was they built an online portfolio of all information that the other group was going to need to learn about this new person. So they included videos, images, links to articles, online comments from their own students summarizing certain articles. This really worked with my class.
Google Slides & Docs
Now the next two I’m going to show you are both Google apps. We’re looking at Google Docs and Google Slides. Now I know you might know this already, but just in case, to create a Google doc from scratch, click blank and to have students collaborate on the same documents, click share, come down to the bottom here, and change this to edit, copy the link and then you can share it directly with the students so they can collaborate together. With Google Docs, one of the activities I love going back to is a type of error correction activity where I take a group or list of sentences that the students have produced, either orally or written, and there are mistakes in those sentences and what I do is: I share the document with the students in class and the students have to work together to find out what the mistakes are and correct them.
Google Slides is just as easy to share as with Google Docs. Go to share, change it to edit and copy the link. Now the way I use Google Slides with my classes is sometimes as a warmer or filler, I assign each group in the class a certain slide which contains an image or a picture. Now what I usually do is I ask students to identify everything there is in the picture by writing in text boxes around the picture.
Google Docs is always coming out with new features, check out the latest one here.
Let go!
Now that we’ve seen all the platforms that can provide an opportunity for collaborative learning in your classroom I think it’s really important to say that as a teacher you need to take a step back and let the students really take control of the task. The benefits I mentioned earlier are only going to happen if the students are allowed to do that, and the end product is not the most important part really it’s more the learning process that the students go through to get there.
Well, I hope you liked the video if you found it useful I’m going to be doing lots of videos about how to get the most out of your students in the classroom so if you haven’t done so yet, please subscribe. And I’ll see you in the next video.