Collaborative intelligence is an essential part of nowadays teaching strategies and I am going to demonstrate as a Chemistry teacher an example of enhancing collaborative intelligence among students.

Two weeks ago, it was supposed according to the weekly plan to start with a chapter that talks about functional groups, and as its well known, we have several functional groups in chemistry that are subdivided into seven main families:

1-Alcohols

2-Carboxylic acids

3-Ethers

4-Esters

5-Amines

6-Aldehydes

7-Ketones

After a brief introduction, I noticed that students had different attitudes towards theses families where each group of students prefer to explore a certain functional group. That's why I divided the class into groups according to those attitudes and in order to attain crowd sourcing, students were provided them the top chemistry blogs and wikis so that they have all the community and collaboration tools between their hands. After that, they were asked to search for the families each group is assigned with. This has enhanced the learning abilities among students specially that each group of students is working with the area of their interest this means that each working group represents an independent community of practice.

Here are few blogs used by the students

http://www.compoundchem.com/

http://www.emilyreacts.com/about/

https://www.chemistryworld.com/

https://chempics.wordpress.com/about/

During their research I was able to send and receive feedback between each group since I was able to be in the online scope of student's activities during any time interval, in addition to that, students were able to ask for any online assistance or intervention from me via social media network created previously for educational tasks.

At the end of the assignments, groups of students were given the freedom to grade each other's efforts, (for example, the alcohol group job was graded by the aldehydes group and vice versa). It was a very effective experience that fixed the concept of collaborative intelligence deeply inside students mentality.