Collaborative Writing

1. Google Docs

http://docs.google.com

Ideas for the Classroom

• Students can collaborate on projects from home, working with partners or small groups.
• Consider a jigsaw where each student researches part of a chapter, then creates a collaborative presentation to summarize the reading.
• Write a "blook"- each person writes a chapter of a mini book or chapters of a story and they can use a writing buddy for feedback.
• Write a "bilingual book"with a person who knows a second language.
• Have students to turn in essays using Google Docs, so it's faster, facilitates teacher comments, and helps monitor students progress.
• Have faculty colleagues contribute to one collaborative document so that everyone has an input.
• This format for collaboration would serve as a medium for science teachers to have their students create new labs as a class. The students wouldn't have to recreate the wheel, but after each lab carried out in class, they could start creating a lab similar (as simple as using different variables).
• Administration, teachers, and parents will cut down on countless emails while communicating about students and their work.
• Have the teachers in your grade level contribute to a document about cutting across the curriculum for a grade-wide project that involves all subject areas.
• Have the parents communicate their thoughts/concerns/questions with other parents that have students in your classroom.
• Enables teachers and students to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations that can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes. Collaboration between the students and the teachers will take place. Students will be able to go back and revise their work and keep track of their progress.
• Teachers and students can share their link to the published presentation and invite others' into the chatroom and the others can be in the room or anywhere in the world. Suddenly, presentations can be interactive and can create a permeable classroom by allowing experts and peers into the room - and allowing students' thoughts out into the world.
• Buddy Book Reports from students consist of multiple students read the same book and collaborate on their final book report in an online document
• Writing assignment: For younger students type a page of complete sentences and sentences that are not complete for the children. Have each student correct the sentence if it is wrong and create a new sentence.
• Send Important handbooks to parents such as rules and code of conduct.
• Students can share notes with each other.
• Students can go paperless and write notes from lectures to their virtual notebook using google docs.
• Collectively students can... Read the same book and write a book report
• Share reflections of a field trip.
• Create a story from a story prompt.
• Recreate an historical event.
• Develop a math word problem.
• Create articles for the school newspaper.
• Write a script for a play.
• This tool can be used to indirectly drive student instruction. For example a teacher can send out a survey on their students music preferences. As those results come in they can see the graph being populated. This then can be compared against other schools that you may or may not send the survey to. From this point, based on your content area, you can determine where to go. If you teach history, and you realize through the results that your students like Rap, you may want to see what some of the major events in rap music where and what was going on historically at those times. If you are a science teacher, you could take the same results and move to a unit on the low frequencies found in most rap music. Finally if you are a music teacher, you may take those results and bridge the gap between your current music repertoire and rap music with the fundamentals of form and structure or dynamic contrasts of the pieces.

(Ideas taken from http://teachweb2.wikispaces.com/GoogleDocs)

2. Storybird

http://storybird.com/

Ideas for the classroom

• Group of students can collaborate on creating a story by having each student contribute to the story on each page. Students will add images to correlate to the story.
• Have students create original artwork either scanned in, or digitally created as an arts integration activity while others take charge of the writing of a particular piece.
• Use it to document a particular event in the classroom, documentary-style by having students engage in various roles of the production process of story-telling. For example, integrate Storybird into a community outreach-based classroom project such as this developing one, where the "News Crew" could use Storybird to create their digital new story:
  P.K.3rd Grade Village Project

(Ideas taken from http://teachweb2.wikispaces.com/Storybird)