In-Class Collaboration

Real Time Community Building with Microsoft Sway in Bella Ginzbursky-Blum’s Russian courses

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.