How to keep students collaborating remotely?

How to keep students collaborating remotely?

It’s easy to let group work fall by the wayside when a teacher or instructor cannot be present in the classroom for ensuring focus. You have every right to wonder — How to keep students collaborating remotely? Even for those teaching in person right now, social distancing prevents students from gathering around, and they are sharing documents using digital devices.

How to keep students collaborating?

Using digital tools as a means of collaboration can keep students connected, sharpen their technological skills, and support core academic features. So, how to keep students collaborating? Here are five ways to enable your students to work together when they can’t be near one another.

Keep students collaborating.

Many schools already use basic tools designed for collaboration, like Google Docs or Slides. Dojoit’s online whiteboard for education is one of the best choices that I have found being a teacher myself.

A teacher can ask students to build on each other’s work in a presentation. The revision history will let a teacher track contributions by author, students in this case, and help those students avoid accidental loss of work. The teacher can also ask students to create a digital bulletin board together to manage a project, organize information, or show their thinking.

Keep students collaborating remotely.

Tools that offer virtual collaboration walls for stickies or images, such as Dojoit, Padlet, or Nearpod Collaborate are easy to learn.

Brainstorms, gallery walks, and sequencing activities can all be taken online with an interactive whiteboard tool like Dojoit’s online whiteboard or Google Jamboard. Breakout rooms can pose a management challenge, but they can be a great way to facilitate virtual discussions or small group work for older students while using a video conferencing tool like Zoom.

Keep students on track by joining random breakout rooms or hold them accountable with shared documents. Harness students’ enthusiasm for virtual worlds by assigning them to work on models together in an immersive environment. Many games like Minecraft and Roblox offer support and tools just for educators.

Connect the project to their learning outside the virtual world and set parameters around which tools or materials can be used to avoid a potential time suck. Ask students to record videos to show their learning with a popular tool like Flipgrid, and classmates can comment on them, or make response videos. Many apps allow students to reflect on each other’s uploaded work, like Seesaw and Dojoit.

Sharing guidelines for appropriate and respectful use of tools like this is key for a great peer feedback experience for students. Ultimately, the same best practices will help your students collaborate remotely via technology as anywhere else; setting clear ground rules and expectations together, designating roles and scaffolding the basic skills needed, and closely tracking student work and progress. With a little bit of tech know-how, you can get your students back into a collaborative zone, no matter where they are.