CYBER GUIDE Web 2.0 has started a collaboration revolution. There's just so many ways to collaborate online. Try chats, forums, wikis and blogs, document sharing ... and then there's social bookmarking and networking. The web is your oyster ...  |
COLLABORATION TOOLS 4U The Internet has opened up a wide variety of ways for students to work together. It’s been proven that working in a group improves academic performance. Collaboration in Teaching and Learning Want to know why allowing online collaboration is important? Have a look at this short clip on collaborative freedom and cooperative online education.
IMing and NetSpeak – The Dialogue of a New Generation Are you the sort of person who feels completely lost when people start to ‘lol’ or say they’ll ‘brb’? Instant Messaging (IMing), with its many acronyms is becoming a part of standard communication for students today and IMing allows for simple collaboration. The article titled “Instant Messaging – Collaborative Tool or Educator’s nightmare!”, available from the University of New Brunswick, looks at the uses of Instant Messaging in education and discusses how and why students communicate and collaborate online. Want to find out more about the collaborative learning in the ever increasing online playground? Visit the ‘Web 2.0 Connections' table on the ‘Cooperative Learning’ page of Web 2.0 & Marzano’s CITW wiki. Here you will find information about how and why applications of Web 2.0 are used in the classroom and a selection of applications to use online for a wide variety of purposes. Almost all these tools are free to use. Want to try out your netspeak, head over to the E-Rock Chat on the student page or go exploring on Online document sharing — The way of the future? Sick of having to email documents every time you need contributions or feedback from others? Online collaboration tools enable multiple users to edit and add comments to documents in one location. Changes can be made from anywhere and viewed immediately by other users. Access to these areas can be restricted to invited users. Visit out Document Sharing 4 U page to view some videos demonstrating two of the best collaboration tools GoogleDocs and Voice Thread. BuzzWord is also a similar site. See VoiceThread in action and learn how to use it in the sample available here. Brainstorming as a Group Online The process of brainstorming is one that is often considered important in education and in any group work process. However, it is a still a process that has remained mainly in the non-digital realm because it has been easier to draw visual aids, such as mind-maps, by hand rather than using autoshapes or paint to draw on the screen. Bubbl.us is a complete free online mind mapping tool which is easy to use. Either make the diagrams yourself or open it up for others to add and improve upon your ideas. Want to be able to attach extra graphics and other elements to a mind map? Try Mind42 . Want to see some of these brainstroming techniques in action? Watch this video that walks you through how to use Bubble.us Want to see some more examples, Mind42 has hundreds of free to view mindmaps created by user from all walks of life have a look here and see if you can find a new way to represent old ideas.
If you want to see an educator's successful attempt at online collaboration? Check out Mr McGowan's RT Website - which is based on the principle that everyone can build a site together! Want to try this yourself? Think Quest allows your students to collaborate with people from around the world.
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