Technology in the last five to ten years has dramatically affected the way we communicate and collaborate. Students today, who are the digital natives of our world, communicate naturally through programs on computers and applications on mobile devices. Between texting, social networks and email, students understand that our world collaborates and communicates via technology and the Web. Our K-12 environments need to rise to the challenge of reflecting the technology found in business and in our personal lives. We need to continually find ways to enrich K-12 environments with a future landscape that includes the technological elements students will be expected to use effectively in their professional and personal lives.
Collaboration in Education
Collaboration is achieved when two or more people share and contribute ideas to a completed task. The concept of collaboration in education is not a new one. Teachers have been asking for students to work on group or partner projects further back than I can remember. Team building is an important 21st century skill, as I mentioned in my past post titled “Visual Learning in the 21st Century.” It helps students learn to cooperate and compromise with others while working toward a common goal. After graduation, students are expected to be productive team members in work and in society. Visual learning can help build this 21st century skill while collaborative technologies can further facilitate communication within groups.
Collaboration with Visual Learning Technology
Visual diagrams help students engage with others for co-learning and even the playing field for students’ participation. Often ideas are lost between words, but become clear and easier to understand with a picture. Students at all levels of knowledge and writing proficiencies can participate in visual collaboration to explore new ideas and share knowledge. Students have had the ability in the past to make visual diagrams as a group in Inspiration®. Now, Webspiration Classroom™ Service, our new cloud computing tool we launched yesterday, better facilitates collaboration for learning.
In Webspiration Classroom, students and teachers can easily share, submit and return work. When a student or teacher shares a document, they have the choice of changing the shared individual’s role between owner, collaborator or reviewer. If a student designates his or her classmate as a collaborator on any given document, the collaborator can make changes or additions and also provide comments. Reviewers can also provide comments, and all students shared on a document can use the built-in chat when viewing and working together on a document. All of these collaborative abilities support students in co-creating knowledge and in peer review exercises while alleviating many of the communication and process challenges of these group projects.
In addition, there is often an issue about equal participation in a group. One student may carry the workload while the others sit back and receive a grade. It’s difficult to hold students accountable and verify the game of he-said-she-said when it comes to group participation. Webspiration Classroom can alleviate this challenge as well. While students and teachers share and co-create documents, there are several ways to monitor the participation of each student in the class.
As collaborators on a student’s document:
- Teachers can view the contributions made by students by showing the changes on the document.
- Teachers can view the history of the document to see when and how the document evolved over time.
- Teachers can also easily participate, providing ongoing feedback, as well as see the comments and chats between students.
Your students will pick up the ability to utilize programs like this quickly. Yet, using Webspiration Classroom will go beyond just integrating technology in the classroom. It will teach your students valuable skills in visual learning, communication and collaboration.
Check back next week to find out what tools aid process writing.
Mona Westhaver
President & Co-founder, Inspiration Software
