Thursday, November 12, 2009

Student Guidelines for Online Collaboration

I was disappointed that Beach didn’t include guidelines for teaching students how to collaborate online. Perhaps it’s not an issue at the secondary level, but if we’re going to use collaborative writing tools K-5, we need to scaffold not only the content but also the behavioral expectations. We can't simply expect that students will know how to do so effectively and respectfully. As Debi’s post reminded me, many of our students don’t even know how to collaborate face-to-face, let alone online! As teachers, how do our expectations change when the collaboration take the form of online writing? How do we communicate these expectations? How do we model and teach students to collaborate online? Our book’s wiki site, usually filled with an overwhelming number of resources, was bare… If Beach buried this topic under a different chapter I wasn’t able to find it. After much searching online, I finally found this resource, a contract for students writing collaboratively through a wiki. It’s a good start but is there anything else out there?

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