Collaborative intelligence is about is demonstrating your capacity to use social inheritance (i.e. knowledge, scientific reports, videos, etc) to extract what you need, add to it your personal flavour and insights, and presenting it in your own unique way. Collaborative work (i.e. a group of people working on the same assignment and incorporating each other’s work into a final product) produces collaborative intelligence. This essay focuses on the tools that are available for students who want / need to collaborate on a project or research.

Students learn more and faster when they collaborate with one another. They learn important skills such as teamwork, communication and problem-solving. Various resources exist to enhance student collaboration.

A few will be mentioned and discussed here.

Google Apps for Education

• Google Docs - share and collaborate on documents. One can see in real-time who is typing or editing by looking at color-coded icons.
• Google Hangouts - facilitates small group discussions.
• Google Slides – create presentation slides together.
• Google Drawings – build diagrams together.
• Google Forms – work together on a questionnaire.

(Lynch, 2017).

Google tools

(Source: https://www.educatorstechnology.com/2015/07/good-collaborative-tools-to-help-students-in-group-projects.html)

(Follow this link https://www.thetechedvocate.org/7-must-student-collaboration-apps-tools-resources/ to get more cool ideas!)

As a statistics lecturer, each year I ask my third year students to do a group project where they have to create their own questionnaire, collect data, analyse it, and present their findings by giving a presentation using Powerpoint slides.

The have used Google Forms to collaboratively construct the questionnaire and Google Slides to create the slides together. It has worked very well and the students always say that this is the module where they learn the most. Not only do they learn to collaborate, but they also learn to make the connection between all the modules they have done at university, and start to see how everything fits in.

I can recommend this to anyone who want their students to collaborate on a project!

Slack

It helps teams to organize their projects – whether it be for group work, online class discussions, or as a shared presentation space. The platform is organized in workspaces. Within a workspace (e.g. a class), team members create specific channels to message all subscribers of the channel. Channels can be public, e.g. lecturer discusses something with all the students in a class. It can select only a small portion, e.g. a project team that have to discuss their project with one another, or it can be one-on-one, e.g. a lecturer giving feedback to one student. Teams can also use the voice and video call features and even share screens. (Stone, 2017)

Classroom response systems (CRS)

These are tools that can either be web-based, or special handheld devices (“clickers”) with the purpose of engaging students in class. They can be used to ask students multiple choice questions, to which all students must reply by selecting a response. However, it can be used for many purposes, which is mentioned below (Bruff, 2019). For more information on this, see https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/clickers/

Types of Questions

• Recall Questions
• Conceptual Understanding Questions
• Application Questions
• Critical Thinking Questions
• Student Perspective Questions
• Confidence Level Questions
• Monitoring Questions
• Classroom Experiments

Types of Activities

• Attendance: “Are you here today?”
• Summative Assessment
• Formative Assessment
• Homework Collection
• Discussion Warm-Up
• Contingent Teaching
• Peer Instruction
• Repeated Questions
• Question-Driven Instruction

Google Chrome has a whole range of useful tools:

Google Chrome tools

(Source: http://tomorrowslearners.com/the-alphabet-of-chromebook-tools-for-students-and-teachers/)

For some more great ideas, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnP0uCqD4k&feature=email

Resources

Bruff, D. 2019. Classroom Response Systems (“Clickers”) Retrieved from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/clickers/

Lynch, M. 2017. 7 Must Have Student-Collaboration Apps, Tools, and Resources. Retrieved from

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/7-must-student-collaboration-apps-tools-resources/

Stone, S. 2017. Engage Students with Online Collaboration Tools. Retrieved from https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2017/09/engage-students-online-collaboration-tools/)