Let’s increase the collaboration among our students? A brief view about some collaborative tools for different educational purposes.

I’ve been presented to some collaborative tools that could be very interesting to apply in my classes toward to motivate and engage students in different ways. I’ve realized the teachers of Tampere University of Applied Sciences try to introduce their classes with a warm-up activity using some of these tools. Beyond the using of specific collaborative tools to make their classes more attractive, all TAMK teachers I’ve seen have used a learning management system (Moodle) to foster a blended learning environment.

The padlet tool (padlet.com) é a platform that allows people to collaborate their thought on a common topic. We used this tool in two situations, at the first one Sisko asked us to write our name in a Brazil map to represent where we live and at the second situation Leena requested us to resume in few words one relevant learning experience of a colleague in the last six months. This tool seems extremely suitable to ice breaking of students at the beginning of the course and to engage students in specific situations of the class.

I have used tools to construct mind and conceptual models for a long time especially in research tasks. Assuming the role of student, I have realized that I could use this tool to resume and to structure ideas from readings, presentations, discussions and others. The tool coogle.it allows that users work collaboratively designing mind maps and I have made a lot this.

There is a world tendency to apply gamification in education and I have seen this process a lot with different teachers in TAMK.  Leena organized a game, like a pop quiz, using a tool called kahoot (kahoot.it). I have thought it should be an excellent strategy to start some classes, addressing contents read by students previously. Kahoot tool foster some king of competition among students at the same time that the teacher is able to accompany the overall knowledge about a specific content. There are two user interfaces, one is offered to the person who will create the game (survey) and another to the game’s participants. Participants must create a nickname and immediately he becomes a game player. The game’s owner has different visualizations to accompany the players’ performance. If the game’s owner desires, he/she can exhibit the participants ranking after each question.

Sami show us a tool very interesting for collaborative interpretation of texts (prism.scholarslab.org). He provided an scientific paper on prism tool and asked us to mark parts of the text that we agree, parts that we disagree and parts that we believe should not have enough information. After that, we could see the marked parts of the text considering the suggestions of everyone who had collaborated.

Sami and Hanna offered us a workshop about Flipped classrooms where they could show us many authoring tools with different examples. After that, they divided us in groups to create an object learning that could be used in a flipped class. It was an amazing experience when I could learn a lot, in addition to seeing the amount of possibilities to apply that acquired knowledge in my classes in Brazil. Flipping some of my classes’ materials will allow the students to develop more practice during the classes and foster environments for them learn by themselves. In this activity we use different resources from Powerpoint, YouTube, Screencast-o-matic and Playposit. The result of our work can be seen in:

https://www.playposit.com/delivery/206400/405872/why-is-good-teams-communication-important-in-a-project