During the pandemic, side-by-side student collaboration took a back seat to online learning and distanced in-person or hybrid learning.
But student collaboration is a cornerstone of 21st-century skill-building, teaching students how to listen to others, build off of ideas that aren’t their own, compromise, and work as a team.
If you’re looking for a new student collaboration tool for your school team to try, or to try in your own classroom, take a look at the tools below.
1. Drawp for School is a K-12 workflow management platform with built-in design tools, swipe-to-share collaboration, standards-aligned content, and unlimited cloud storage. Students use Drawp creativity tools to add drawings, voice recordings, text, and photos to assignments. Teachers use Drawp to create, distribute, collect, and give written or verbal feedback on assignments. A new Drawp Resource Marketplace website provides teachers with an easy-to-access repository of educational resources to download and share. Partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the platform includes robust accessibility features such as an add-on language scaffolding tool, text-to-speech and voice recording. For iOS and Android.
2. Using Peergrade, a teacher sets up an assignment, picks a feedback rubric from the library or creates their own, and selects an assignment template. Students submit their work and then review each other’s work using the rubric to give feedback. Students are able to interact with their feedback. One perk? Students learn to give and receive, and act on, constructive criticism.
3. Parlay lets students participate in live roundtable discussions in a blended manner, inside or outside the classroom. Teachers create a discussion prompt from scratch or copy one from the Parlay Universe, then invite students via email, magic link, Google Classroom, or Microsoft Teams. Students submit a unique response before seeing their classmates’ ideas. Optional secret identities help give all students an equal voice. Students read through and respond to each others’ ideas during class or on their own time. Guided feedback questions help scaffold engagement and encourage critical thinking.
4. School Friendzy is a collaborative learning system for personalized assignments, peer to peer tutoring, and more. If a student can’t figure out how to solve a problem in an assignment, he or she can see how other classmates answered it correctly. Students can see how their classmates solved each problem and can rate their explanation of the problem. This motivates students to put extra effort into their explanation.
5. Popplet is a simple mind mapping tool that helps students learn visually and creatively, with greater retention. Real-time collaboration features help students work on projects together. This also makes sharing their work extremely easy.
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