In a Nutshell

Faculty members who want to develop a sense of community among their students look more and more to the affordances of technology to help them. While there are many tools out there to help foster a sense of community and collaboration in your course, there are very few that allow for real time, in-class community building. Bella Ginzbursky-Blum has tried many tools over the years to varying degrees of success. Technology for real-time collaboration in the classroom has historically been less than ideal. With the advent of real-time collaborative tools like Google Docs, the ability to collaborate in the classroom without the technology getting in the way is now becoming more of a reality. Bella has brought one such tool, Microsoft Sway, into her classroom in an innovative way that has had a transformative effect on the way she teaches her Russian Literature class.

Lessons Learned

Things that worked well:

1. Since all students have a free Microsoft Office 365 account, they have unlimited access to Sway as well. The application is cross platform and web based, so there’s nothing to install and no compatibility issues.
2. Students really enjoy working together on in-class exercises and then visualizing their work immediately projected for class conversation.
3. Exercises are very quick to do, allowing the technology to reside in the background.
4. Students are more comfortable discussing their ideas in smaller groups before sharing with the whole class. Class discussions are more engaging.

Things to think about improving for next time:

1. Most of the negative issues with using Sway for these in-class assignments have to do with the problem of training the students how to add content to the presentation so that it works correctly when displayed for the class. These issues are usually not major, but some familiarity with the software before they use it in class will improve the experience.