Collaboration Celebration!

by Josh Eick, OTAN Subject Matter Expert

OTAN stock photo

Collaboration is a must-have skill for any student who wishes to succeed in higher education and/or in the modern workplace. According to an article on collaboration published on the EducateMe website, there are 10 benefits to collaborative learning:

1. Honing problem-solving skills
2. Encouraging social interaction
3. Promoting diversity
4. Refining communication skills
5. Inspiring creativity
6. Building trust among colleagues
7. Boosting confidence
8. Encouraging commitment to group tasks
9. Enriching enjoyment in one’s work
10. Developing critical thinking skills

There is an additional benefit for many of our students: Enhancing language skills.

Most of us are already familiar with tech tools for classroom collaboration, like Google Docs, Figjam, and Whatsapp. However, collaboration for collaboration’s sake doesn’t always lead to the development of the skills listed above.

When I began teaching, I had my students work together all the time. Over time, I began to notice a couple of things: Often, one or two of the students would dominate the activity and take on most of the work; some students would be uninterested or disengaged from the activity; and students would often forget the skills that they used when asked to repeat similar tasks later. Years later, I discovered that the way I was approaching collaboration was the problem. My activities had no real-world purpose or objectives, they lacked structure and clear instructions, and they weren’t focused on my students’ interests. Worst of all, they weren’t preparing my students to succeed in the world at large.

In order for our students to gain the collaborative skills necessary to succeed in higher ed and compete in the modern workplace, educators should strive to use collaborative tech tools to mirror tasks encountered in those settings and ensure that students have the knowledge, skills, and directives to do those tasks well.

To do this, you should consider the purpose of the collaboration. What will ABE, ASE, and college classes ask students to collaborate on? What are teams directed to collaborate on in the workplace?

Some possible collaborative tasks include:

• Projects
• Reports
• Evaluations
• Problem-solving
• Organizing ideas
• Brainstorming
• Scheduling
• Experiments

Why not try some of these tasks in your classroom? The most important things to do to ensure the success of these collaborative classroom activities are to make the topics and goals of these tasks relevant to the students’ own goals and interests, ensure that students understand exactly what it is that you’d like them to do, and be clear about what their roles are in these tasks. The Center for Teaching Innovation lays out a great plan for securing this success:

• Introduce group or peer work early in the semester to set clear student expectations.
• Establish ground rules  for participation and contributions.
• Plan for each stage of group work.
• Carefully explain to your students how groups or peer discussion will operate and how students will be graded.
• Help students develop the skills they need to succeed, such as using team-building exercises or introducing self-reflection techniques.
• Consider using written contracts.
• Incorporate  self -assessment and  peer  assessment for group members to evaluate their own and others' contributions.

I would add two more important things to consider:

• Modeling the tech skills necessary to use collaborative apps is crucial.
• When setting ground rules for participation and contributions, keep in mind that students can collaborate together in real-time, or they can contribute individually outside of class since the other students in the group will be able to see what their peers are doing as the electronic document will be a shared document. However, if you permit students to contribute individually outside of class time, be sure that you and/or the students assign specific tasks to each other so some students don’t end up doing much more work or much less work than others.

Luckily, there are some popular and user-friendly tech apps which will allow your students to collaborate on projects. Let’s examine three that you may already be familiar with, but perhaps haven’t used to encourage student collaboration on real-world tasks. I’ll include examples of how I use the apps in my classroom. Those apps are Google Slides, Padlet, and Google forms.

Google Slides for class presentations

Figure 1

Google Slides, part of the Google Suite of applications, is a user-friendly presentation tool that makes classroom collaboration seamless, whether you teach a low-level ESL class or a high school History course. The app can be accessed on desktop or laptop computers, tablets, and phones. Most districts allow students to access Google Suite apps through their SSO email accounts, and even when they don’t, students can use their personal email accounts to sign in.

Students can collaborate on a class presentation, whether in an ESL class (popular dishes of the world; ailment remedies; internet safety tips), a CTE course (changing a tire; dying hair; taking a blood sample), or an ABE or ASE course (a summary of the Civil War; finding a square root; solving climate change).

The great thing about Google slides is that a teacher, or a student, can create a new presentation and adjust the settings so that anyone can access and edit the presentation collaboratively in real time. Sharing the slides in this way requires no special access or account. I teach an upper level ESL class. My course outline has a health and safety component, so I asked my students what health and safety issue they were most interested in. They voted and ‘talking to a doctor’ was the most popular topic. I asked what type of presentation could be related to this topic, and they decided that presentations on typical illnesses, their symptoms, and remedies would not only be a great way for them to learn the language necessary to talk to a doctor, but to teach their peers this language as well.

Let’s break down what happened there: We honed in on a problem (what topic to focus on), brainstormed possible solutions, and came to a consensus that worked for everyone. A real-world example of collaboration and problem-solving, and we haven’t even started the lesson yet!

To prepare my students for their Google Slide presentations, I planned a number of lessons and activities, most of them collaborative, that laid the groundwork for the presentations that they would create. Examples of these activities included group discussions about typical topics, conversations, and questions encountered during a doctor’s visit (outlining the information to be included in the presentation later), choosing an illness from a list of common ailments and grouping students by ailment choice, researching information about the ailments from articles posted to my LMS (thank you ChatGPT for writing these level-appropriate articles!), teaching topic-related vocabulary and grammar (like modals and the subjunctive), and summarizing the research that they learned into simple English.

All of this ‘pre-work’ allowed my students to focus solely on the technical tasks of creating a presentation at the end of that unit. I modeled every step of how to create a Google Slide presentation from start to finish (which I recorded in case anyone missed the class or someone wanted a refresher). Then, we brainstormed the best way to divide up the tasks of making the presentations in groups. My students decided on two options: dividing tasks by type (text, images, background and colors, design, etc.), or assigning slides to students (introduction, symptoms, remedies, etc.). Each group chose the method that worked best for them and divided up the tasks. They had time in class to work on the project,and in addition, they were encouraged to work on their own tasks outside of class. In a situation where someone finished their tasks early, they became a ‘tech assistant’ available to anyone who needed help.

Figure 2

In the end, the presentations were amazing. The students were engaged because they chose the topics and the means of producing the end product, were accountable to their fellow students to get the job done, felt the weight of responsibility to teach their peers something valuable, learned valuable language and tech skills, and met their goal of learning how to speak to their doctor in English. Real-world collaboration in action!

For a more in-depth view on how to use Google slides in the classroom, check out Melinda Holt’s 3-part OTAN Google Slide video presentation.

Here is another simple tutorial:

• How to Use Google Slides in 2025 (Quick Start Guide)

Padlet for organizing ideas and brainstorming

Figure 3

Padlet is an easy-to-use ‘bulletin board’ app, much like Jamboard used to be, which allows users to add text, images, audio, video, and links to a board. The app can also be accessed on desktop or laptop computers, tablets, and phones. Like Google Slides, most districts will allow students to access Padlet through their SSO email accounts, and even when they don’t, students can use their personal email accounts to sign in.

The free version allows students and teachers to have up to 3 free Padlet boards. If one has used all 3, you could just delete an old board and have access to a new one.

Padlet is a great tool for allowing groups to collaborate on brainstorming, problem solving, mind-mapping, creating cause and effect chains, making goal action plans, debating ideas, etc.

An example of how I use Padlet for collaboration in my class is to prepare for a class debate. Students vote on an issue to debate, are divided into groups, then assigned ‘pro’ or ‘con’ by a coin flip.

Padlet has a pros and cons template which divides the board in half. Groups collaborate on arguments that support their side and list them on the Padlet board. At my level, students are supposed to build critical-thinking skills, so I also have them brainstorm arguments that they think the other group might say and add those to the opposite side of the board. Finally, I have them add a section near the bottom of the Padlet board to prepare rebuttals for the list of opposing arguments that they brainstormed. This way, every group will come to the debate armed with arguments and rebuttals which usually leads to a more impassioned and interesting debate.

What’s the payoff? Collaborative, organizational, and critical-thinking skills, which are key to success in modern educational settings and workplaces.

For a ‘how to’ on using Padlet, check out OTAN SME Cindy Wislofsky’s article, “Let’s Continue Classroom Collaboration!”

Here are a few more great OTAN videos and articles on using Padlet:

Discover -- or Rediscover -- Padlet by Kristi Reyes

Engaging Online Learners with Padlet by Monica Espinoza

Padlet: Brainstorming/Prewriting Activity

Google Forms for creating polls, student-generated quizzes, and self-assessments

Figure 4

Google forms is an easy-to-use survey generator. I’ve found that my students really love using this app. Like Google Slides, the app can be accessed on desktop or laptop computers, tablets, and phones, and again, most districts allow students to access Google Suite apps through their SSO email accounts, and even when they don’t, students can use their personal email accounts to sign in.

Google forms is a great tool for allowing groups to collaborate on class surveys, peer-generated quizzes on class material, and assessment forms for peer/self feedback.

An added bonus from this app is that once the forms have been filled out by participants, Google forms will automatically generate result graphs which can be copied and pasted into reports.

Figure 5

The unit that I use Google forms in is by far the most complicated and longest, but the payoff is huge. By the time we finish the unit, I have covered nearly half of the standards and exit skills listed in my course outline, and my students have learned an incredible number of 21st Century skills that will give them the edge over others entering the next phase of their education or the workforce.

Here’s what we do. First, I show them how to create a survey using Google forms. It’s very user-friendly. You can choose a variety of survey question types to ask, like yes/no questions, ‘choose one’, multiple choice, and scaled answers. I then group them and let them choose a topic for their survey. Recently, we did surveys on personal safety. They collaborate on a shared form, and when they finish, we post links to the surveys on our class LMS.

Figure 6

Students are welcome to share the survey links with family, friends, and co-workers. I have a contest where the group who gets the largest number of responses wins a prize.

After a set time period, the surveys are locked (preventing additional responses), and I show the students how to see graphs of the results. This is built right into the app. (See fig. 5 above.)

After a lesson on reading graphs, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions, the groups collaborate to write a report on their survey results using Google Docs. Graphs can be easily copied and pasted onto a Google doc. (See fig. 4 above.) The groups then present their reports to the class. Talk about mirroring 21st Century work skills!

For a more in-depth view on how to use Google Forms in the classroom, check out Melinda Holt’s 3-part OTAN Google Forms video presentation. Here’s a Google form article by Cindy Wislofsky: Survey, Quiz, and Schedule Appointments Skillfully with Google Forms

Summary:

Students who are able to successfully collaborate on tasks and projects with others will have a leg up when they transition into higher-ed programs and/or seek future employment. These apps are easy-to-use and can be adapted to the needs of your program or class, as well as to the skill levels of your students. Taking advantage of these and other collaborative apps in your classroom, in authentic settings which mirror real-world tasks, will equip your students with skills that will pay off in dividends in the long run.

Related articles:

OTAN SME Cindy Wislofsky wrote a wonderful article on collaboration that inspired this article. Check it out here: “Let’s Continue Classroom Collaboration!”

References:

Kondrat, S. (2024, August 19). 10 Main Benefits of Collaborative Learning. EducateMe. https://www.educate-me.co/blog/benefits-of-collaborative-learning

Collaborative Learning. (n.d.). Center for Teaching Innovation. https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/active-collaborative-learning/collaborative-learning