Collaborative Tools in the Classroom

For something that wasn’t even around 10 years ago, much less part of any official curricula, social media—championed by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networking platforms—sure has seen a rather meteoric rise to a position where it dominates the cultural context in our schools and colleges of today. So much so, the phrase “social-first generation” is now being used to describe how dramatically conversations have moved into the social space in our educational institutions. It’s redefining how students engage with each other, how they stay informed on the latest, and how they spend their free time. It’s a no-brainer then that education should leverage social media in the classroom, isn’t it? Yet, when I speak to educators and students, social media is at best used for fulfilling social needs—making plans, keeping in touch with friends—and rarely so within the classroom. In fact, it’s not surprising for most students and teachers to find themselves in institutions where either social media is blocked, or policies for access are so draconian that social media never ever percolates into the teacherstudent interaction. It doesn’t help the cause that there are several cases of Facebook-gone-wrong in the education field, be it teachers and students inappropriately ‘friending’ each other on Facebook or students posting hate messages against teachers in a social forum. How do educators navigate the hitherto unknown social landscape to deliver real benefits of social-oriented education? First and foremost, educators have to accept the inevitable—social media is here to stay, and it’s better to incorporate it into your pedagogy than avoid it (or worse still, fight it!). For instance, schools in the US and UK have found that locking down access to study related sites alone not only detracted from learning, but conveyed to the students that they could not be trusted to take responsibility for their actions. In addition, avoiding the discussion altogether meant that children were less likely to understand proper Internet safety and how to avoid becoming targets for phishing and cyber-bullying attacks. To begin with, if the class is yet to get acquainted with each other, social media tools can serve as excellent ice-breakers, and sites like Wallwisher, AnswerGarden and VoiceThread let you start quick discussions and polls for class activities. Tools oriented towards survey taking—Poll Everywhere or Poll Daddy—are excellent not only to solicit responses from the public for research related projects, but also to cast a wider net and involve parents and alumni on course initiatives. Next, understand that the flip side of the distraction argument is engagement, and any teacher will tell you that engaged students learn better. Utilising blog-like systems such as Schoology or Edublogs allow teachers to create private social networks around a course curriculum, and lets students to not only submit coursework to the teacher, but have it open for discussion with the rest of the class, yet do so in a context where the environment is safe and monitored. I particularly liked Edmodo, a site which first began as a secure platform for classroom micro-blogging, and has now evolved to allow teachers and students to organise course work, sharing files, conducting polls, and communicating with one another via mobile devices. What’s more, the fact that it looks and feels similar to mainstream social-media sites means students who regularly use Facebook or Twitter will be right at home. Next, promote social media beyond the obvious benefit of communication to cover aspects of class collaboration, and make collaborative tools as part of your classroom work flow. For example, tools like Sync.in and Google Docs allow multiple authors to work on one document simultaneously, while chatting with each other on the edits they’re making. The benefit with both these services is that students can continue to access the spreadsheets, documents, and presentations anytime from any connected computer, be it their home PC or a smartphone or tablet. And finally, a lesser-discussed benefit of social media in the classroom is to prepare the students to leave school and university with the most marketable and industryrelevant skills. Think about it—social media is really good at maintaining an ‘always-on’ connection between groups of people—and educators and placement cells can connect alumni and students on closed-door Facebook groups to evolve a model of industry mentoring and crowd sourced virtual apprenticeships. These groups can be classified based on target industries and allow students to connect with specific alumni on a regular basis to give their future careers the much needed nudges in the right direction. Taking this idea one step further, one could even develop a list of “who to follow on Twitter” —thought leaders in each industry that students could be recommended to follow, to “shadow” in a sense, and connect with professionally to develop their networks— another must have skill in the workplace. And let’s not forget—social media skills, by themselves, are in growing demand in the contemporary economy worldwide and employers require job applicants to possess some digital media-related skills.