Collaborative Tools

What are collaborative tools?

Collaborative tools refer to " tools and platforms people use to work together with a digital environment" (Warren, 2020). These tools have given people the capacity to work together across the world without being physically in the same room. They help us brainstorm, complete activities and create. There are many collaborative tools, some of the tools I have interacted with as an educator and a student are Padlet, Google applications: Jamboard, doc, spreadsheet, sites, classroom.., and Microsoft 365 suite: word, Excel, Visio etc.

Using collaborative tools as a teacher

As a teacher, I use collaborative tools like Jamboard to complete activities. One such activity was a goal board for the academic year. I also used it for them to complete their solutions to questions/worksheets together in our scheduled classes. I have also used breakout rooms to put my students in groups so they can complete graded classwork activities. Here are a few pictures below.

This picture was edited by a student, she inserted some cute elements that made it stand out: the pins on the post-its, the stars and the whiteboard with markers were all her addition. This simple activity has activated creativity.

In this picture of a goals board, I only added the background and my students inserted their goals. 

I used different backgrounds for all my classes and I continued using the board as a whiteboard until all twenty (20) pages were completed before using a new one. This reduced the number of Google Jamboards the students has to access, which should make searching for lessons and solutions easier.

The activity done on Jamboard was done in pairs so that one student completes the question and the other person would check the work to ensure it was accurate.

A student completes his given question on his assigned page.

I do not always write the students' names on the Jamboard board however when I want to go through several questions during class time I would assign pages hence their names would be inserted. The challenge they experienced was typing symbols which weren't on the computer or Jamboard and writing with a mouse pad. 

Using collaborative tools as a student

Collaborating as a student for an online class was pretty easy after my trial and error experiences as a teacher. I collaborated in activities using different applications which were led by my teachers. I also used collaboration tools in completing assignments as group/pair work. Here are a few pictures below of those activities.

Class activity on the application, Padlet.

Eportfolio using Google sites

The version history of a pair assignment, in Google Docs.

Reference

Warren, G. 2020, 23rd December. What is online collaboration? Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/faqs-about-online-collaboration-2377250