How Can Google Docs Help Foster Productive Collaboration?

Collaborative learning is associated with a host of benefits, including:

• Enhancing student learning
• Getting students more involved in class and with course content
• Helping students learn how to work in groups and become comfortable with diversity
• Increasing student-student and student-faculty interaction

But there’s one very big problem with group work—managing it.

Once you’ve divided your class into groups to work on writing, presentations, or other assignments, how can you monitor student activities and gauge the effectiveness of their collaboration?

The answer is obvious—let technology help. Thanks to teaching tools like Google Docs, it’s easier than ever to make collaborative learning a more prominent part of your teaching.

Find out what cloud-based services can do for you and your students in How Can Google Docs Help Foster Productive Collaboration?

Benefits

Course content isn’t all students learn during their college years. They also learn how to learn—and work—with others, skills that are essential for success in their professional and personal lives.

In just 20 minutes, the program presenter will show you:

• How to use Google Docs to create and share documents and presentations with students
• Different techniques for monitoring group work using Google Docs
• Effective strategies using technology to provide and resolve comments on students work

Learning Goals

After participating in this presentation, you’ll be able to:

• Use features of Google Docs, especially monitoring and commenting, to promote collaboration
• Recognize opportunities that will make effective group work projects for collaborative learning

Design a collaborative learning project that can be started and completed in a single class or continue for several classes

Topics Covered

Have you ever thought the secret to teaching through collaborative learning is the ability to be in more than one place at a time?

Google Docs lets you do that…to a certain extent. This web-based freeware lets you monitor student progress on group work synchronously and asynchronously.

With Google Docs, you don’t have to depend on peer evaluations or chance observation to review student collaboration before an activity is completed.

This technology lets you divide students into groups, set them loose on a task, such as writing documents or developing presentations, and still monitor and comment on each students work individually.

How Can Google Docs Help Foster Productive Collaboration? will show specific ways the teaching tools of the 21st century can help you be the sort of instructor you always wanted to be.

Employing a very direct and easy-to-follow speaking style, the presenter, a widely published author, will discuss:

• The three main challenges of group work and how Google Docs helps you meet them
• The three key decisions you need to make when starting to work with Google Docs
• The four characteristics of a well-designed group work task
• The four most useful Google Docs teaching tools for collaborative learning

Audience

Maybe it was the student you suspected was coasting on the work of other team members …

Or the bored looks on the faces of the super efficient students who’d finished their project and were waiting for others to catch up…

If you’ve ever tried including collaborative learning in your teaching and have been frustrated by the challenge of keeping tabs on different groups, then this Magna 20 Minute Mentor will address your concerns.

Purchase

Help your students start learning the lifelong skill of collaboration—and get more out of your course. Order this Magna 20 Minute Mentor today!

Product Code: PM14MA