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Online collaborative tools
In a traditional educational method,
students produce assignments in the form of paper documents
which are then handed in to a teacher for marking. Teachers
then annotate the work and hand the work back. The students
then amend the document with the required revisions and hand
the document back to the teacher again.
There are two main drawbacks with this
traditional method; firstly that it takes protracted time
for the work to be passed in physical form between the
teacher and the student and, secondly, because it
involves generating and tracking multiple copies of a single
piece of work.
Both of these problems can be addressed
by establishing collaborative working through the use of
documents which are shared on-line. The most important feature of online
collaborative tools is the ability to share single documents
between multiple users in such a way that only one copy of
the original document ever exists.
This method can also be
used for supporting teamwork projects with multiple students
working on a single document and is suitable for all age
groups and subject specialisms. I did this project with two
year groups comprised of two classes one being year 5 and
the other year 6.
An additional benefit of this project
was that, as a group work activity, more able students
supported the less able and all pupils were able to benefit
as a result.
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