Good teamworking skills enhance learning in every area of the curriculum.
And digital collaboration tools can help you make the most of class teamworking opportunities.
Group projects can be truly collaborative when you use digital methods. Young people can work on shared online materials at the same time, instead of producing separate project elements in isolation.
This approach to group working enables learners to play to their individual strengths. They can adopt project roles, and review their shared documents for different success criteria.
Digital methods are also ideal for providing opportunities for formative assessment.
Challenge learners to test any available tools and identify the most useful for working together on a particular task. For example, which would be most useful for allowing us to work on a document at the same time?
You can access online collaboration software that’s free and available via platforms such as Hwb.
Digital collaboration tools provide great scope for inter-school projects where no face-to-face interaction is possible.
For example, young people from different schools could work collaboratively on humanities projects comparing lifestyles in different geographical areas. Distance is no obstacle to digital teamworking.
So, digital tools can transform not only the way we work together, on the same thing at the same time, but also who we work with, no matter where they're located.
When it comes to collaborating online, the sky’s the limit.
In this short film for teachers Rhys ap William explains how using digital collaboration tools enhances group learning and collaborative skills.
Teacher notes
Learners can access online materials at the same time which makes team work possible. These tools also make it possible to work with classmates in school and while at home, or even work with other schools.
Interschool projects can be undertaken, even on an international level. A good example is a humanities project comparing lifestyles with students based in other countries.
Collaboration is a good way to get students to play to their strengths and take on certain tasks within the group. Online collaborative resources like Hwb are ideal methods for collaborative learning.
More from this series:
Storing and sharing. video
In this short film for teachers Jennifer Jones talks about the importance of encouraging students to store files in an organised manner so that they can be found easily.
Planning, sourcing and searching. video
In this short film for teachers Rhys ap William talks about using digital tools to help students plan for a research project.
Creating. video
In this short film for teachers Jennifer Jones explains how to get students to enhance their presentations by using creative digital tools.
