Online collaboration tools are simply tools that help students work together on projects. These tools can facilitate communication, data organization and presentation, student scheduling and management, and which time-saving for teachers and administrators within the school.
online collaboration tools for students. Goodness! There are a lot of terms used to describe a new generation of networking and communication tools. Some people call them social media sites, some folks say they’re Web 2.0, and others say they’re just new fangled gadgets that kids today use to watch YouTube videos. Whatever you call them, one thing is for sure—they’re changing the face of education as we know it. In this article, we’ll look at some of the more popular collaborative sites and talk about their implications for education
Dig social bookmarks? You’ll love Diigo
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
Source: https://drawpforschool.com/#tools
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.
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.
Google Drive (drive.google.com)
Most of you are probably already familiar with Google Drive, which lets you share and collaboratively edit Google Docs with anyone else who has a Google account, for free. Sweet. Being able to collaboratively edit documents and worksheets opens up a world of possibilities for interactive classroom activities and projects.
Edmodo (edmodo.com)
This multi-platform, device agnostic, kid-safe platform is perfect for active learning – share content, have a dialogue (in or out of the classroom), and even get parents involved! A rich set of features including collaboration-enabling functions like Learning Communities and Discussions have encouraged over 34 million teachers and students to adopt Edmodo, making it one of the most popular free education tools on the Web.
Conclusion
Online collaboration tools allow students and teachers to work together on projects. They can use this technology to share information and help each other learn.
Online collaboration tools allow students to study and work together on the same project from multiple locations, or write papers and complete group projects in real time. These tools provide a means for students to work together in real time across distances and in different time zones.