Key Concept 13: Communication Skills
13.1 Candidates will be able to help students use technology tools to collaborate with others inside and outside the classroom.
In ET 630 with Dr. McGinn, I created a Telecollaborative Project with a music teacher that requires extensive collaboration with other students in both a synchronous and asynchronous fashion. The basis of the project was to have students from different countries working together to learn each other's national anthem. This type of collaboration requires ways for the students and teachers involved to be able to share information in real time. The Zoom platform as described would allow for students to listen to each other's performance of the anthem and provide immediate feedback on how it sounds and what improvements need to be made. The use of a common wiki for publishing student created arrangements within the class also allows for the sharing of commonly created and used works so that all students are using the most up to date music when practicing at home. This level of collaboration and interactivity is really the only way such a project would be possible as anything less would simply be students learning the music of another country at the request of their teacher with music provided by their teacher. The entire point of the learning experience is to practice arranging and helping teach others how to play your own nation's anthem.
13.2 Candidates will understand technological tools for collaboration with colleagues and demonstrate the disposition to use technological tools for collaboration in appropriate ways.
Almost every course in the Educational Technology program has included a combination of individual and group assignments. With the strictly online nature of my cohort's program, we have had to make extensive use of collaboration tools in order to complete assignments. The most common tools I have used have been Google Docs and group text chats. Outside of the ET program, I have used Google Docs and Dropbox extensively with my fellow department and grade level members to collaborate on common curricular items.
Most of the group projects I have worked on have always started with some sort of brainstorming or "working" document that often includes the specific assignment and rubric. This often prevents needing multiple documents open at once while working. I have found that working in different colors for each group member is often helpful in tracking ideas as well as the comment function. These working pages are also helpful for dropping in links to any material referenced or used in the final project to assist in the creation of the actual reference list as we do not have to go back and recreate what we accessed.
The Telecollaborative Project required a very extensive brainstorming document as I was working outside of my content area and was unfamiliar with the necessary standards and tools that would be required. So this document included a lot of background material to help me understand where my project partner was coming from so that I could contribute in important structural ways to the design of the plan for the collaboration.
The Webinar that we developed in the ET 662 course was created in a very short amount of time when not all team members were even present in the same time zone because of travel. It was essential that we had a common place to put down ideas and links. For this project we also worked out of a larger folder that included all of the associated documents and platforms that we created to use in our webinar, but this planning document was created first.
In a project similar to the webinar, in ET 690 we had to facilitate a synchronous discussion of part of the text we were reading. My partners and I had ten chapters to lead a discussion on and we created a common note-taking document so that we could add our thoughts on the chapters while we read and then use those thoughts as we went back and created an overall structure for our discussion. This made it easy to find common areas of interest to draw discussion questions from as well as create learning activities around.
For smaller assignments like the frequent infographics we collaborate on, it is often simpler to generate a group text chat where we can quickly assign roles and communicate in real time about what needs to be done and what everyone's ideas are. This form of collaboration is really only useful for smaller projects as more complex projects would overwhelm such a simple platform.