Module 10: Collaborative Classroom Technologies

Chai & Tan (2010) define collaborative learning as social interactions that are aimed at gaining deeper knowledge and understanding.  Sing, Wei-Ying, Hyo-Jeong & Mun (2011) extend this definition to include students learning to see from their peers’ perspective, extend group and communication skills as well as awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses as collaborators with the assistance of teacher prompted reflection. 

Given that technology is itself an interactive tool, then it is clear to see the connection between using technology as a collaborative tool within classrooms. Collaborative technologies allow for a range of ways to support learning by providing a medium by which students can share and exchange their ideas as well as their creations (Laurillard, 2010). Collaborative learning technologies encourage active learning as well as peer learning. 

Pedagogy practises surrounding collaborative technology need to be thoroughly thought out to ensure that the technology is properly exploited for the possible capabilities it can offer, creating innovative learning designs rather than simply replacing traditional ones (Laurillard, 2010).  

Online collaboration tools with brainstorming applications, such as Popplet and Mindmeister, can be used to help students to generate and share ideas. Finholt and Teasey’s (1998) found that groups using computer brainstorming tools generated more ideas and experienced more evenly distributed participation among group members as the contribution of each student could be recorded. They can serve as a formative assessment or used to engaged students in peer learning, where students can post feedback on each others work and this also helps students to assess their own skills. 

Similarly, document collaboration technologies, such as Google Docs and Evernote, can be utilised in group research projects. These applications have features to encourage effective collaboration like chat options, codes to identify different authors, including comments and tracking of changes.  

There are potential challenges of incorporating collaborative technologies into learning including that some students may have difficulties learning to use the tools if they are not experienced with them. A strategy to overcome this would to be to provide direct instruction prior to the task to help students become more familiar with the tool (Center for Teaching Excellence, Cornell University 2014). Another challenge is that some of these tools allow for anonymous commenting, which can be beneficial in that it encourages all to participate. However it can lead to comments that are offensive or distracting from the topic. Clear guidelines and consequences should be set around the use of such tools to prevent this behaviour. 


References 

Center for Teaching Excellence, Cornell University (2014). Collaborative Learning: Group Work. Retrieved from http:// www.cte.cornell.edu/teaching -ideas/engaging-students/collaborative-learning.html. 

Chai, C.S., & Tan, S.C. (2010). Collaborative learning and ICT. In Chai, C. S. & Wang, Q. (Eds.), ICT for self‐directed and collaborative learning pp. 52‐69. Singapore: Pearson.

Finholt, T., & Teasey, S.  (1998). The Need for Psychology in Research on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Social Science Computer Review, 16(1),  pp .40-52. 

Laurillard, D. (2009). The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies. International Journal Of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(1), pp. 5-20.

Sing, C., Wei-Ying, L., Hyo-Jeong. S., & Mun, C. (2011). Advancing Collaborative Learning with ICT: Conception, Cases and Design. Ministry of Education, Singapore. 


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