Collaboration Tools

Whether you're working with students face-to-face, online, or a combination of the two, collaboration is a great strategy to help students feel engaged, build teamwork, and improve communication. Below are some of the instructional design team's favorite free or low-cost tools that can help you with collaboration.

Click the images to visit each tool's homepage.

Brightspace Groups

Using the Brightspace Groups tool, you can create discussion or work groups manually or automatically in your courses. Then, assign discussion topics, assignments, or quizzes to specific groups. Students can submit work as a group or individually.

Sample uses for Brightspace Groups:

Group project submission
Small-group discussions
Peer review activities

Padlet

With Padlet, you can create custom bulletin-style boards to use in your face-to-face or virtual classroom. Users can add text, video, images, and links to their posts. Padlets can be embedded directly into Brightspace. A limited number of Padlets can be created with the free account. Unlimited Padlets cost about $10 per month.

Sample uses for Padlet:

A weekly class bulletin board
Sharing space for individual or group projects
Anonymous discussions and idea sharing

NICC Google Drive Tools

Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Forms, Drawing, and Jamboard can all be utilized for collaboration in a physical or online classroom.

Here are just a few of the many sample uses for collaboration with Google:

Class brainstorm session
Annotation activities
Ordering and organization activities
File sharing
Group presentations
Drawing activities
Group assignments

Wakelet

Wakelet is a tool for curating content and resources in an individual or collaborative way. Students can build Wakelets to research topics, build a list of resources, make group study guides for exams, and more. Wakelet is completely free to use.

Sample uses for Wakelet:

Research organization space
Vision board activity
Storytelling project

Additional Resources

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