Week 7: Collaboration

I find this tough.  I don't want to go so far as to say that I am against having my students collaborate on projects.  I will say that for the online courses that I teach, it is difficult for me to come up with many realistic collaboration opportunities in general.  Additionally, there are several challenges.  Age and maturity level (junior high course), wild variations in student dedication/ethic, varying school fidelity of course implementation, and varying school schedules are some of the main hurdles.  I hate the idea of assigning a collaborative distance project, and seeing a dedicated student get stuck carrying the weight of others in order to preserve his or her own success.  Even more, I hate the idea of turning off a dedicated student because he or she got stuck in a remote collaboration with people who were poor teammates. 

That being said, I can see plenty of opportunity for collaboration in certain kinds of classes and projects.  Age, maturity, and work ethic are factors that hopefully improve in our upper level courses where we can more easily foster large collaborative projects.

Let's move on to resources.

I don't want to waste a ton of time on our 500 lb. gorilla in the room.  But I will simply give Google their due.  As most of the education world has gradually become comfortable and proficient using various Google things, saving in drive, and sharing with others, a teacher's quest for collaboration could start and end there.  Dropbox could be considered one of the co-runner-ups in my opinion.

I liked the padlet site/app mentioned in this course.  Especially if a team were developing a project and sharing resources and ideas asynchronously, something like this would absolutely be the ticket.  I got an account and am awaiting the right chance to utilize this tool.  Thanks Nicole for sharing that with us!

There are several other collaborative online spaces that people can also use.  I'm a fan of sites that don't require an account or login.  It simplifies things for students, who can get overwhelmed with all the different logins and passwords.  There is a site called meetingwords.com. And it's not anything super unique, but it is free.  With no login you can just get a meeting space and share the url with whomever your heart desires.  Typing in it and sharing is so simple there are really no instructions needed.

One resource that is brand new to me that I found during research for this week:  Mindmeister.com 
This is a website where you create "mind maps."  It's a neat graphic organizer where group members can work synchronously and asynchronously with a shared mind map.  The collaborative possibilities for this resource abound.  There is a basic, free version available.  It is, however, limited to creating a maximum of 3 maps.  Below is the map I made just kicking the tires so to speak.

In my past distance delivery classes, some ways I have fostered online student collaboration are:  Class created glossaries, where students define terms by editing the glossary in Moodle; Sharing and commenting on video projects; Scavenger hunts, where students from other schools help each other with hints in a moodle forum; Writing workplace scenarios in forum and responding to other groups' scenarios. 

Something I'm planning on doing for future collaboration is to change the approach to our career videos we make.  Through the course I help students learn about themselves and look into setting career goals.  I want to have students with similar/same career aspirations work as a pair or small group with students from other schools on researching their occupation and creating their video together.  To do this I plan on having the students use a medium such as Moodle forum or Meetingwords.com as a means to share information and ideas, then map out a plan on Mindmeister.com or Padlet.  The maps can be shared, downloaded, or printed for grading.  Finally the culmination of the project will be a slick Animoto video.  I'm already excited to see this come to fruition!