Classrooms have been using web-based collaborative tools for years. We’ve come a long way with online collaboration, facilitating learning and improving productivity. With the rise of affordable cloud-based software, we’ve been fortunate to see a surge in the number of great online collaborative tools available for educators.
Whether you’re an online teacher, a classroom teacher, or both, there are so many collaboration tools at hand. But so many of these tools are geared towards one specific audience — either teachers or students. My number one fear with collaborating online is that we lose the inter-personal connection that makes teaching what it is. There are a lot of things online could improve upon rather than just replacing classroom teaching but when it comes to tooling (learning management systems (LMS), web conferencing, discussion boards, video conferencing) the benefits outweigh the negatives.
Classcraft
Classcraft is a fun and engaging collaborative tool as well as an educational role-playing game that students and teachers alike can play remotely. Students collaboratively work in association to oversee their classroom experience. The fun part is students can create stylish characters: Guardians, Healers, and Mages.
Classcraft strives to create a digital community in the remote-learning environment and motivate students to be a part of it. Teachers can set remote behavior expectations to boost student engagement and keep them motivated throughout the coursework. The following are a few behavioral attributes teachers can encourage by using Classcraft.
- Being on time for lessons
- Participating in forums and discussions
- Submitting the assigned work on time
- Setting goals and working towards them
Random events help teachers to kickstart the class for the day. These events are specially designed to improve student focus and get them ready for the day.
Source: https://help.classcraft.com/hc/en-us/articles/217901528-Class-Tools-Random-Events
Students can use Classcraft’s messaging feature to stay connected with their friends and teachers. This allows teachers to send encouragement, answer questions, remind them to join the lessons, and to monitor their progress.
CueThink
CueThink is a newfangled upskilling application with a focal point on critical thinking skills and mathematics collaboration for primary to high school students. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it aspires to nurture a growth mindset and encourage the student fraternity to see challenges as opportunities.
CueThink’s web platform allows students to create “thinklets” of their solutions which upon publishing, get reviewed by peers and teachers from the domain.
(Source: cuethink.com)
Peer-to-peer learning and math conversations get easier as math geeks can discuss problems in real-time and engage in conversations using Annotations; thus being more efficient while acquiring knowledge remotely.
Padlet – Gather web content
Padlet is a digital bulletin board similar to well-known Pinterest but designed especially for collaboration. It’s like a wall or a notice board, where the entire class can allocate documents, links, video, and images online for further implementation. For example, you can collect important classroom files or have students gather resources for research. A powerful feedback tool will help you assess students’ work.
Cost: free version; $99 per user/year (Business); $2000/year (School).
Wakelet – Gather web content and bookmark everything
Wakelet is another curation tool, an alternative to Padlet. It is a digital bookmarking platform that allows you to collect multimedia resources in folders and manage them. With Wakelet, you can bookmark everything on the Internet, even tweets. Then you can put your content into off-the-shelf templates for lesson plans, group projects, research, assignments, etc., and embed this into an LMS.
Cost: free
Diigo – Gather web content, annotate, and share it
Diigo is a free bookmarking tool available as a browser extension or a mobile app. With Diigo, you can organize your personal library of any online resources, highlight them, and put sticky notes on them. Set up a Diigo group and share the resources you’ve found with colleagues or students, discuss them in attached comments, and start forum discussions.
Cost: free by default and for educators; other versions from $40/year.
Zotero – Gather sources for research and share them
Zotero is a free research software that helps you to collect research sources and papers from various sites, and store and share them all in one place. You can build a common research base or a collaborative bibliography list, collaborate on ongoing projects with colleagues in public or private Zotero groups, and discover people with similar interests with tagging and citations.
Cost: free
Quizlet
Students can review and quiz each other from the comfort of their own bedrooms with Quizlet. Students make sets of flashcards for an upcoming test, and then they can share them with their classmates. This allows students to split up the workload as well. You can even divide the material into sections and have each student make cards for one of those sections.
Twiddla (www.twiddla.com)
Twiddle provides a really easy to use collaborative online whiteboard. This “no setup web based meeting playground†is quick and easy – inviting others to collaborate by just hitting the green GO button to start a session and then use the Invite option. This app provides a great set of tools. You can easily add an image, web page, or document as a background to markup. There is a color palette tool, pen width tool, a shapes tool, and text can be inserted. There’s even a chat option built in.
Drawp for School
Drawp for School is a creative, collaborative, content, and workflow management K-12 platform. Some of its key features include swipe to share collaboration, overflowing design tools, cloud storage, add-on language scaffolding tool, text-to-speech converter, and voice recording.
The tool is partially funded by the National Science Foundation and has received an honorable mention in EdSurge DILA 2014. Drawp for School is COPPA certified, thus complying with children’s online privacy rules.
Drawp works for discrete subjects as it provides a common annotating board for teachers to explain concepts analogous to the blackboard in a classroom. This smartboard feature improves student collaboration and stimulates their creativity while allowing them to draw or write on the go.
The app is available on Chrome web store, App Store, Play Store, and Windows. The tool offers a 30-day free trial for cloud-based storage after which the teachers have to upgrade the account to an unlimited plan without worrying about the number of students, classes, and cloud storage.
Minecraft: Education Edition
Minecraft: Education Edition, as the company says, “is a game-based learning platform that promotes creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in an immersive digital environment.” It is used by educators from more than 115 nations across the curriculum.
The following are the salient features of Minecraft: Education Edition tool.
- Intensive STEM learning – aims to promote 21st-century skills such as collaboration, creative problem solving, and digital citizenship through project-based lessons
- Classroom-friendly features – a series of tutorials and game features to bring subjects to life and to empower the educators in classroom management and formative assessment
- Creativity and Innovation – opportunities for exploration, storytelling, and digital learning by the means of mixed reality and computer science
The tool is highly effective for teachers as they can find lessons across subjects and ages. Math, Science, History, Language Arts, Visual Art, Tech, Geography, Music, Health, Religion, and Leadership are some of the subjects available in the lessons pool.
Remote learning with Minecraft offers three collaborative methods for students and teachers.
Teachers can encourage global collaboration where students add to a world, export it, and share with fellow students who can, later on, add to the original design.
One such example of an in-built student collaboration initiative is the book cover challenge. With this, the students can create their own Minecraft book covers using the book-themed world in 2D or 3D.
The full version of the tool can be simply accessed with an Office 365 account with a limited number of logins in the free trial. Thereafter, you will be required to purchase a subscription bought through AEPs or Microsoft Store for Education.
Popplet
Popplet is a simple yet robust K-12 collaboration tool enabling the KG-goers and high schoolers alike to learn visually. Students from far off places will find this tool helpful as it supports more than 100 languages. Another great feature of Popplet is the easy real-time collaboration for students ー students can work together on projects and share them right away.
The image simply shows how to use popplet. Source: https://www.popplet.com/
Visual learning, mind map learning, essay planning, timelines, and charts and trees 一 all can be done with Popplet. The signing up process is quite simple requiring only an email address. Once the account is up and running, students can create a new popplet by clicking on my popplets > create new popplet.
Popplet’s shared with me option lets the students view the popplets created and shared by others. Besides, they can also view public and featured popplets for more ideas and brainstorming,
The free version allows you to create only one free popplet, but they could have offered more to help better understand the tool. For unlimited mind maps and effortless collaboration, solo monthly or solo yearly plans are available. Last but not least, the groups & schools package extends infinite popplets and group collaboration.
Symbaloo – Get your tiles in a row
Symbaloo is a homepage curation tool that organizes online resources, games, videos, and other files into tiles. To create a fun and engaging learning path, you can embed articles, videos, or quiz questions into a customizable pathway of tiles and share it with your students. To search for content curated by other educators, look in Symbaloo’s gallery. This will also help teachers to collaborate on curriculum mapping.
Cost: free version; pro versions start from $49/year.
ConceptBoard – Think together and draw on a whiteboard
ConceptBoard is a collaborative online whiteboard for representing ideas in visual flowcharts. Edit content together on a digital canvas, use screen share and video chat, and draw sketches to brainstorm ideas graphically. You can also attach sticky notes, drag-and-drop images, videos, PDFs, and other files on this whiteboard.
Cost: $6 per user/month (Premium). Free 30-day trial.
Conclusion:
To work collaboratively in the classroom can often be time consuming, especially if you are a beginner. However, there are a number of online collaboration tools that can help you to make your classroom collaborative. They enable you to create a central hub where everyone can see what’s going on. Some even allow you to set up discussions so that students and teachers have the chance to ask questions and raise ideas. It’s incredibly powerful and helps you to condense the learning process into a more manageable timeframe