Collaborative+Tools



toc =Collaboration=

Collaboration isn't simply about teamwork or sharing workloads; it's about students learning from each other. Especially in the field of writing, students learn by sharing, editing and proofing each other's work. In the process, they learn from the skills and strategies of other students, and they learn through the most powerful learning strategy of all - teaching. Collaboration is, in many ways, about students sharing their skills and understandings. It is also part of the emerging phenomenon of Web 2.0 wherein the global network of ideas is no longer controlled by centralised organisations. Everyday users are shaping, reshaping and re-imagining what ideas are important to us.

Below are some tools that will help students to collaborate on their work. Amongst them are some samples from other wikis at Mazenod College where student collaboration has been particularly effective.

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=Wikis=

A wiki is a webpage that uses wiki software for the easy creation of online material. Typically, wikis are used for collaborative projects involving any number of people. The most famous wiki, //Wikipedia//, is an example of a website where the content is the result of the online collaboration of innumerable users. The advantage of wikis is that they are relatively easy to create and can range from the very simple to the relatively complex. Wikis do not require webpage design skills and can be edited very easily. There are a number of wikis in use at the moment at Mazenod. The selection below are in their infancy, but they do show the emerging power of wikis in the school environment. For a more detailed overview, go to the Working with Wikis page.


 * Mazenod Literature || This wiki is designed for Literature students to collaboratively create notes and to produce practice essays in groups in preparation for exams. This page also shows how video can be integrated and how PowerPoint slideshows can be embedded via a free third-party site call Sliderocket. ||
 * Year 10 Extended English || This wiki is also very new and began with the My Favourite Poem project in which students located and reflected up poetry that they found meaningful and interesting. ||

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=Etherpad= media type="youtube" key="UpxLLzgQ-1Y" height="209" width="342" align="right" Etherpad is an online real-time collaborative writing tool. It allows multiple users to simultaneously produce and edit work. The applications for this are powerful. Writing product on this site is never deleted from the servers. The site works on each pad having a unique url that students can access. Their product is publicly viewable, although users would need to know the url. That also means that the work can be saved. Also, there is an infinite page history through a time slider tool that will protect work from unexpected events.
 * 1) In an English course, it can mean a group of students collaboratively writing an essay in real time, learning from each other and gaining an incredible amount of knowledge in a short amount of time. Quite simply, students can type faster than they can write, and they can use class time more productively as a result. Their product can then be exported to a Word document or posted to their class wiki.
 * 2) Narratives can also be produced in real time.
 * 3) Scientific reports and experiments can be produced in real time.
 * 4) Students can work collaboratively from home even if they don't access the product at the same time.



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