Enhancing Collaborative Learning with Technology

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for enhancing collaborative learning with technology. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the following essential question-- how can I enhance collaborative learning with the integration of technology?

For this lesson, we're going to look at the four Cs of collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity.

Let's begin with collaboration. We want to technology-- we want students to be able to collaborate in real time and across settings. And we want technology that allows the students and teachers to do that collaboration. It's not just student and teacher collaboration we're looking at, though. It's peer-to-peer collaboration, as well as community stakeholders and the students.

A couple of technology examples that can help us are Google Hangouts or Skype, where students can do a face-to-face collaboration. We can also use Google Apps such as Google Docs or Google Presentations. And in this way, students can work together or they can work individually on documents or presentations.

Next, we want to look at communication. And our goal here is that we want technology that allows our students to communicate in real time and across settings. And there is just a ton of resources we can use. We can use Twitter, Facebook. We can use Chat features in Google Doc. We can use video conferencing and so many more.

Next, we want to look at critical thinking. And this is just how the students can think critically to solve problems. So what technology exists that can assist us in that? And there are a couple different things. There's Google Scholar, which is a Google search that is going to search specifically for scholarly articles. There's InstaGrok. There's Advanced Search. There's Boolean tools, which is where the student can learn different search phrases to assist them in their search. There's using GapMinder, as well as Wolfram Alpha, and so much more.

And by using these technological tools to help with critical thinking, it can also help the students when they go to search library catalogs. Or if they use a university library, those Boolean tools are really going to help them navigate the databases that are available there.

And then have creativity. And remember that this is just how the students are going to create-- this is how students create. And it might be a way to show mastery. So we want technology that's going to help the students create and publish in new and different ways.

So they could create by creating a blog or a vlog, which is a video blog. They can use digital storytelling. They can use Prezi. They can use Thinglinks, different websites, Vines. They could create a wiki. Again, the possibilities are endless.

So keeping in mind that the four Cs have to do with collaborative learning, in what ways will you use technology to enhance collaborative learning in your classroom? Or what is the technology that wasn't on this list that you use to enhance collaborative learning?

Today we answered the essential question of how can I enhance collaborative learning with the integration of technology?

For more information on how to apply what you learned in this video, please view the Additional Resources section that accompanies this video presentation. The Additional Resources section includes hyperlinks useful for applications of the course material, including a brief description of each resource. Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.