Online tools to enhance your learners' collaboration
Hello everyone! Last time I talked about technology and learner autonomy. My interest for this week is learners' collaboration, which also plays an important role in promoting autonomous learning. The sociocultural theory of learning by Vygotsky (1978) stresses the idea that learning is a social process. This means that social interaction plays an important role in cognitive development. By collaborating with peers, learners co-construct knowledge more easily.
What does ICT add to collaborative learning? My answer to this question is that you no longer need to be in the same place to be able to collaborate with others. There is a wide range of online tools that can help you share your ideas wherever you are and at a time convenient to you. Today, I would like to talk about one of these tools-Tricider
Tricider is a user-friendly online platform which can help teachers get students work collaboratively by sharing ideas about a particular topic. This tool is completely free, and is available here. You don't need to log in to use Tricider. When you open it, it will look like this.
All you need is to type the question you want your students to discuss, then click 'go'
Here you have your question created, and need to proceed by clicking the highlighted field to invite students to share their answers. You will have many options to invite your students by means of emails, social media, or by sharing a link generated by the platform.
The following is a video in which ESL teachers from the Teachers of English as a Second Language Association of Ontario talk about how the tool works and how to use it with English language learners. This video is also accissible on YouTube.
What is interesting with Tricider is that students can argue for and against the topic (Pros &Cons). They can also vote for the most favourite shared ideas.
After exploring this tool, I believe that it is a good anline tool that I can use to help my engineering students. When it comes to the use of technology, my students get excited because it is their area of study. Therefore, I can take advantage of this tool to help them develop their writing skills. This tool can also help me monitor my students' writing progress online and provide comments and advice for improvement.
What I think might be a drawback of this tool is that less confident learners may feel anxious to share their ideas online for the fear of being laughed at by their peers.
You can find an example of a tricision that I have created on this link
I hope You enjoy to read my post. Please, leave a comment to say what you think about tricider.
Hi Jean, this is a very neat and well-organised post. I've enjoyed reading this, thanks. Yes, as you have students doing engineering, they would learn and use the tool very easily, I could presume :) But the tool itself seems user-friendly as well (as you said too), I believe other users would enjoy working on it as well :) I like that you pointed out the role of ICT in collaborative work - it enables users to work together at anytime and anywhere! So true!
Hi Jean, this is a very neat and well-organised post. I've enjoyed reading this, thanks. Yes, as you have students doing engineering, they would learn and use the tool very easily, I could presume :) But the tool itself seems user-friendly as well (as you said too), I believe other users would enjoy working on it as well :) I like that you pointed out the role of ICT in collaborative work - it enables users to work together at anytime and anywhere! So true!
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