Technology: Taking the Pain Out of Collaboration

The tools we studied this week showed us how we can take some of the pain out of the collaboration process. We've all read about how important collaboration is for our students, but today our students are busier than ever. Is it really fair to ask them to coordinate their insane schedules in order to create a thoughtful, creative project? I remember hating having to work out times to meet with a group, but thankfully, tools like Wiggio are making it easier than ever to collaborate on a project with what little spare time we may have. 

With Wiggio, students can share links to videos, images, or websites that may help them with class projects, ask each other questions, share ideas, create to-do lists for specific members of their group, set due dates, and even take polls so that they can decide on a common topic or idea. With Wiggio, students can get the majority of their work (or even all of their work) completed before they ever physically meet together. For my first project this week I created a Wiggio from the perspective of a teacher to my students, and posted links and files that my students would need to complete the assignments I made for my Content Area Literacy class, and it was so easy and fun to play around with. 

From a teacher's perspective, Wiggio makes it easy to collaborate with students. It's basically like a more user-friendly version of Blackboard, and with it, teachers can create to-do lists that their students can actually cross off on their own, post anything and everything their students would need for the entire year, and poll the students on anything from how they feel about past assignments and reading strategies, to what the students would like to study next. With Wiggio, we wouldn't have to wade through hundreds of e-mails just to communicate with our students. Everything could be organized in one spot that makes everything easy to find.

For my second project this week, I created a glog on figurative language. Originally, I had to present this lesson by opening up different file folders and different websites to show videos as I went, but with my glog, everything was in one spot so I had to do was scroll and click on what I needed, and the key words that I wanted students to learn were just typed right next to the videos on my glog. As I made the glog, I learned more about figurative language and had fun making it look exactly how I wanted it to. I thought that it might be fun to have my students collaborate on making their own figurative language glogs. Using my glog as a model, they could find their own YouTube skit video that employed the use of figurative language and their own YouTube music video with lyrics that employed the use of figurative language, and then type the kinds of figurative language next to the videos that they chose on their glogs. This way, the students have a chance to choose videos that they enjoy, realize how common and effective figurative language is in writing, and collaborate to create something that they can be proud of.  To help the collaboration process, the groups of students could create a Wiggio group so that they could share videos and ideas they'd want to use before they finally got together to create their glog. 

With these kinds of technological collaborative tools, we can really show our students how important it is to collaborate, and show them that collaboration can make even the biggest, most daunting tasks possible. We as teachers can also use these tools to make our students feel more involved in our classes. We can offer them more opportunities to voice their opinions and share their interests so that our classes can be more fun and more meaningful in the long run.