Students are taking full advantage of the Internet, often working on projects with students from other parts of the world. The Internet has made working with other people online easier than ever. There are even websites for virtual meetings, classes, guest speakers and more. This article gives you a list of some of the best websites that offer ways for college students to connect to one another.
When I talk about online collaborative tools, I refer to web-based tools that enable teachers and students to perform a wide range of tasks, such as interactive discussions, online collaboration activities, sharing and accessing electronic learning resources, and many more others. Here is the collection of great online collaborative tools that I have gathered for you, enjoy!
Padlet
The first tool on my list is a great one for sharing digital content and improving the engagement of the students. It has two versions (for school and for business), and provides a controlled learning environment that helps the teacher to enhance the writing process. Here are some of the functions you can perform with Padlet:
- Teachers can create special brainstorm sessions where they invite students to discuss some topics, all with excellent opportunities provided by Padlet, such as sharing Internet findings, ideas, and visual aids.
- Book review sessions are another great lesson idea. Create a session dedicated to a book and invite the students to share their reviews and comment on the ideas of others.
- Students can use Padlet as a portfolio for showcasing their best school projects on their profile.
- It has a feedback tool to provide an assessment of students’ work.
- Links to various multimedia resources are provided.
TodaysMeet
This is a toolbox for teachers that takes classroom management to another level. With TodaysMeet, this task becomes so much easier because of a wide variety of available functions. They include:
- Discussion forums
- Empowerment of students by letting them have some teaching responsibilities
- Possibility to include unlimited number of students to the class
- Meetings
- Presentations
- Online seminars
- Movies and silent activities
- Review of work by classmates
Socrative
Virtualizing student content has never been easier! Socrative is an innovative platform for teachers and students that is essentially an application for effective classroom management. The developers of this great app have put a special emphasis on having fun and on interactive activities, which are perfect for increasing the engagement of students. The features of Socrative are below.
- Activities that engage students
- Quizzes featuring the most interesting topics from the lesson
- Reporting to enhance the students’ understanding of the class on an individual level
- Chat and discussion rooms to promote online collaboration
- “Space Race” feature that encourages friendly competition among students with intergalactic quiz bowl
- Feedback to improve the experience of the students throughout the course
Twilda
One of the most popular online collaborative tools for teachers is this “web-based meeting playground.” It allows the class to perform Internet research collaboratively and share their findings with each other and the teacher. This is a great tool for those teachers who want to prepare K-12 students for writing college papers because it involves a lot of writing assignments. Here are the tool’s features:
- Online meetings
- Online discussions
- Sharing of images, email, and documents
- Voice chat
- Screen capture
- Unlimited storage
- Total moderator control
Collaborize Classroom
This is a topic library where teachers can find, create, share, and download inquiry-based discussions on any educational topic. As a result, the teacher receives a unique URL which can be sent to the students to begin the lesson. The teachers are free to:
- Select hundreds of pre-written lessons
- Create their own lessons
- Start discussion with students
- Receive and give feedback
Scribblar
This is another popular tool that received a lot of great reviews from teachers (you can read them on the website). It is an online collaboration platform that is perfect for students because it provides many incentives for teamwork as well as great technology to engage in creative work. It also allows for adding more classes to one discussion, and you can save the chat transcript. The main features of Scribblar are:
- Online chat
- Upload of images and documents
- Activities for individual students
- Discussions
- Separate projects
With an intuitive, user-friendly interface designed by teachers for teachers, Edmodo operates as a communication portal for students, teachers, and parents. No more questions about assignments, quizzes, and grades. Edmodo creates a space where everyone can communicate confidently without the pressure of a group setting or the inconvenience of scheduling face-to-face conversations.
Rather than fighting the overwhelming popularity of video games, this app’s designers decided to use it to increase student participation in K-12 classrooms. Loosely based on popular role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, Classcraft “reframes student progress” by allowing students to create a personal avatar. Then, throughout the course of everyday class activities, students earn character upgrades through positive behaviors, regular attendance, academic achievement, and more.
Despite its potential pitfalls, social media is still a powerful tool for collaboration. But in a school setting, the open source platform of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can be distracting for students. With its familiar, interactive design, Yammer allows customized groups to share ideas, information, and feedback, making it an ideal communication tool for teachers, students, and parents.
For teachers looking to expand their students’ worldview and understanding, PenPal Schools might be the ticket. The global PenPal community, which consists of more than 15,000 educators in 150 countries, is ideal for project-based learning in a variety of subjects. With a focus on security and safety, program access is open only to verified teachers and students, and teachers maintain the ability to monitor all messages.
Part mind mapping tool, part PowerPoint, Popplet gives students a clear, concise way to compile multiple ideas on a single topic and share them with each other. From brainstorming for a writing project to visualizing relationships between newly discovered images and information, this cooperative application lets users record their thoughts from a tablet or computer and display them for the rest of the class to see.
With the tagline “Make Math Social,” this engaging app uses classroom interaction to enhance problem-solving skills. When presented with math problems, students use CueThink to select a strategy and display their work. The app also gives classmates the ability to share positive critique and feedback. As students learn to solve problems, they also gain the ability to communicate their thought process to others.
Minecraft is arguably one of the most popular video games in the world, and this academic version allows teachers to incorporate lessons into the open-world gaming environment. Minecraft Education Edition engages children in group exercises that, according to the game’s developers, “promote creativity, collaboration, and problem solving in an immersive environment where the only limit is your imagination.”
When it comes to exciting subject matter, most teachers will tell you that economics rarely tops the list. However, with web-based games that let students simulate real-world scenarios, Economics-Games.com weaves in a little friendly competition to make the subject come alive. Since there are no apps or software to download, students and teachers can access the games wherever there’s an internet connection.
This exciting educational tool puts the “active” in “interactive.” While GooseChase features an extensive game library that teachers can use to teach everything from physical education to basic grammar, the app also features scavenger hunt-style lessons that can also add an extra element of fun to field trips. As a bonus, GooseChase developers also incorporated staff training and professional development exercises.
By focusing on 3D design, Makers Empire gives students the opportunity to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in an online collaborative environment. The designers of Makers Empire began with a desire to encourage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning at the early stages of education. The popularity of this online tool suggests they accomplished their goal.
With so many online collaboration tools for students, it is helpful for classrooms to have interactive displays that can accommodate a wide array of apps and programs. Thanks to their software agnostic design, Clear Touch Interactive® panels do just that. Each panel features a crystal-clear, ultra HD picture, bundled software package, and intuitive multi-touch technology that encourage students to get actively involved with their education. To see a Clear Touch™ panels and software in action, schedule a Live Online Demo today.
Student-To-Student & School-To-School Digital Collaboration: 30 Of The Best Digital Collaboration Tools For Students
1. Dig social bookmarks? You’ll love Diigoh
Remember the old days when a librarian came carting books into your classroom for an upcoming report?
Imagine Diigo as a digital version of that librarian and the entire internet as her cart. Items in this cart, however, can be retained for as long as you like without the fear of overdue book fees. Diigo, which stands for ‘Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff,’ is a great social-bookmarking tool that helps students or classes capture relevant research articles on a given topic.
By offering mobile versions via Android and iOS and add-ons downloadable for Firefox and Chrome, Diigo can be accessed anywhere, anytime—perfect for lessons in the classroom and those that extend out into the field.
See also 12 Of The Best Bookmarking Tools For Teachers
How We Use Diigo
This tool has become a crucial part of our school’s approach to managing project-based learning resources. Since we are constantly on-the-move, a few books, let alone entire physical libraries, are impossible for us to reasonably transport. Diigo eliminates that concern, and helps our students curate and build an ever-growing library of bookmarks for our modules year after year.
Countries and specific place- and project-based modules have their own groups for students to contribute to and annotate resources. When a guest speaker visits, we can quickly create a research group to curate a list of resources so that our entire student body is informed and attentive before the speaker arrives.
2. Tap into your students’ love of video with Flipgrid
FlipGrid is a video tool that is meant to encourage discussion and engagement. These short video-logs allow students to share ideas and opinions in a fun and hands-on way, as video submissions are often more enticing to students than a written response (this is especially true for teachers of ESL learners, who sometimes get anxiety about their written work.)
FlipGrid provides another approach for long-distance collaboration: The time limits are an added challenge to students who sometimes struggle with brevity. It’s important to note that the free version offers limited features, while the paid version features offer full student collaboration and video conversation.
How We Use FlipGrid
In our Economics and eCommerce module, students use FlipGrid to summarize, discuss and review two different resources for the project-based learning module. In the module, students learn social entrepreneurship and e-commerce by developing a web store to support rural artisans.
Before their arrival in India, students researched the stories behind successful brands and shared them in a ‘grid.’ In the ‘grid,’ students use rhetorical devices to compete with their classmates to pitch the story of the brand they selected. This early application of rhetoric devices develops throughout the module before students present a business pitch to a panel of potential investors.
3. Collectively annotate YouTube videos with VideoAnt
As a former history and anthropology teacher, I was thrilled to stumble across VideoAnt. In the past, my students would laugh at the number of times I would pause a video to ask a question or interject a counterpoint. Now, instead of just showing a YouTube video, you can annotate YouTube videos to maximize efficiency and learning.
Students and teachers can add comments to video ‘Ants,’ adding all sorts of untapped academic potential. Students can point out bias, critique video style, and ask probing and clarifying questions, just to name a few uses.
Also, if any coaches are reading this, this makes for an excellent review tool when analyzing practice drills, pre-game scouting, and game film breakdowns.
How We Use VideoAnt
In our Zero to Infinity module, students carved up an hour-long documentary about mathematics titled “The Story of One.” Educators annotate certain times with questions for reflection and short answers, while students annotate with different follow-up questions, and clarifying comments.
Due to our students’ geographic diversity, there can be large gaps in their understanding of mathematics. This tool helps educators gain more insight into the student math experience before starting the module.
4. Create & Collaborate Anywhere in the World with Padlet
Padlet allows for creative collaboration using a range of different mixed media sources.
In real-time or across time zones, students can contribute videos, images, comments on a virtual corkboard. Each student can comment or reply to the work of another student or add a new strand on the topic that is introduced.
How We Use Padlet
During our ongoing “Water and Sustainability” module, students are using Padlet to document their experiences with data collection and the use of statistics in their daily life. They are sharing passions, applications, and websites to help each other realize the everyday benefits of understandings statistics. These include a range of topics such as distance running, gardening, vegetarian nutrition, and sleep maintenance.
By learning about each other, they are in turn gaining a deeper understanding of the wide range of applications of statistics.
25 More Of The Best Digital Collaboration Tools For Students
5. Skype: Video chat, text chat, etc.
6. Zoom: Live stream video and video chat
7. Google Drive: Collaborate on multimedia projects, share files, collaborate on documents, etc.
8. WeTransfer: Transfer files of almost any size with WeTransfer. Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive (9) are decent alternatives.
10. Scribblar: Online collaborative whiteboarding. Also consider ‘Explain Everything.’
11. Microsoft Translator: Translate languages via text, voice, or photograph to more easily communicate in other languages. Also, consider Google Translate (12)
12. Twitch: Stream games for game-based learning. Channels, chat, and more.
13. Pear Deck: According to the developer, Pear Desk is a tool for Google Slide presentations and templates that allows you to transform “presentations into classroom conversations with an array of interactive and formative assessment questions.”
14. Kahoot: Game-based learning and content reinforcement through competition and collaboration
15. Drawp: According to the developer, Drawp is “a K-12 platform for creation, collaboration, content, and workflow management” Also consider Seesaw (16) learning journal.
17. Minecraft for Education: Students can work together to explore ecosystems, solve problems through design, architecture, etc.
18. Voicethread: Content-based conversations about selected media through ‘threads’
19. Explain Everything: Similar in function to Voicethread but focused on students visually demonstrating knowledge rather than through voice.
See also Free Explain Everything lesson ideas.
20. GooseChaseEdu: Online scavenger hunts. for team-building and content reinforcement.
21. Microsoft Teams: A digital hub likely best-suited for project-based learning support. Also consider Slack (22) Redbooth (23) or Trello (24).
25. Spiral: A formative assessment tool with video, group and quiz exercises, completed in class or at home, collaborative review, etc.
26. Piazza: A free, K-12+ Q&A platform
Also consider Quora (27) or reddit (28).
29. Peergrade: According to the developer, Peergrade is a “free online platform to facilitate peer feedback sessions with students.”
30. Playposit: According to the developer, Playposit is “an online learning environment to create and share interactive video lessons. Teachers begin with any online video (screencasts, Khan Academy, TED, etc.) and transform what is traditionally passive content into an active experience for students, with time-embedded activities.”
Tip: Most tools are either for ‘school’ or ‘not school.’ That means tools like Seesaw and Explain Everything are made for school and tools like Quora and reddit aren’t. Obviously, school-friendly tools have many benefits (e.g., data privacy) but drawbacks as well (e.g., lack of authentic content). When using ‘not made expressly for school’ tools, try to leverage its strengths while minimizing its pitfalls.
Conclusion
College is all about experimentation. It’s a time when many young people begin to develop their sense of independence and identity. College life, especially for online students, requires that they develop the ability to be self-sufficient while still needing to rely on other individuals in certain situations. While college can be a social, enjoyable experience filled with parties and social events, sometimes it’s important to remember the academic aspect of being an undergraduate student. While this may mean it’s necessary to spend hours each day studying alone, it doesn’t have to be an isolating experience. With the right tools at your fingertips, you can enjoy problem-free collaboration with others without having to see them face-to-face.