Task Design: Collaborate
COLLABORATE
Classroom discussion has a .82 effect size. You know how important it is for students to hear each others' ideas and to process their learning and view points. How can you bring this important element of learning to the digital classroom? While video conferencing is a best practice, many of our students imply cannot engage in live class sessions. If you choose to host a live session, record it and share it on your LMS for those students to view. Here are some ways students can engage in collaboration:
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- Voluntary Book Clubs: Meet via Google Meet, share discussions on a discussion board to questions. Take turns having students post questions.
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Text Rendering in a shared document or group discussion board. (In Canvas
Links to an external site. and Google Classroom you assign groups discussion boards, pages, and assignments for co-creation and collaboration.)
- As they read, students are asked to identify an important sentence, phrase, and word and place them into an online collaborative document. These have to be from different parts of the reading.
- When they meet in the live session, they each take a turn sharing their sentence.
- Then they take turns sharing their phrases.
- Finally, they share their words.
- Then they discuss what they have noticed about patterns in their selections.
- Jig Saw: You know how effective Jig Saw can be in the classroom! Did you know it has a HUGE effect size of 1.2! You can still use jigsaw in remote learning. Assign groups and have those expert groups present their info in a discussion board via Google slides! Tips for doing this are in this article from TCEA .
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Discussion Boards: Discussion boards can be used at any portion of learning--to introduce, to process, to assess. You can post an article, image, or video and have students respond. However, teach them protocols for discussion board response and prepare clear rubrics to guide what online discussion looks like. Be present in the boards to model and question to deepen thinking.
- For online discussions to be successful there are certain protocols and best practices to be followed. To learn more about facilitating discussion with your students, see these guides: