One of the reasons I love Google Docs is that Google Docs easily creates a secure environment for collaboration to take place.
Download your 3 R’s of collaboration poster.
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But here is the problem:
When I was teaching full time, one of my frustrations was that when I issued the students a group task, usually only one student would do all the work and the other students would ‘collaborate’ [insert generally be distracted].
It didn’t matter if I was using a piece of cardboard, or a piece of software, the outcome was generally the same.
When I saw a Google Doc for the first time I was sold! To be able to see my students writing at the same time was such a great help to my classroom management efforts; and this was before revision history was added (click that link to see how to use revision history in the classroom).
But here is what I discovered:
Working together in a Document isn’t necessarily collaborating
Just because we are writing in the same space, doesn’t mean we are working together to produce a better document.
So over time I developed my 3 R’s, that every student must follow whenever they are working in a group setting, regardless of the medium.
My 3 R’s of collaboration are:
Read:
This might seem obvious, but the basic foundation of collaboration is that you are aware of what the other group members are contributing. Often students can hand in a group task and have no real understanding of what the other members have learnt and contributed.
Reflect:
It isn’t enough that each of the students just read each others work, but they also need to reflect on what has been done.
When reflecting they need to be asking themselves…
- Do I understand what they have written?
- Can I add any value to this (a link, rewording, a different point of view etc)
Respond:
Contribute to the overall project by adding value to what they have read and reflected on.
There must be evidence of the students doing all 3 of these R’s otherwise true collaboration hasn’t taken place.
You can easily track the 3 R’s via revision history and tracking comments between students. I’ll show you how I use commenting to track collaboration in my next post.
