Group projects are great to foster interaction, but also cooperation and collaboration among students.
Tips for creating effective group projects online
As a teacher you should:
- Select the groups yourself and create balanced groups mixing weaker and stronger students and promoting balance of skills. This means you should know well your students. So better to implement group works along the way, when you already know the students and students have already interacted with each other.
- Create simple tasks with clear instructions, making clear how the assessment is broken down, how to proceed (break the task down into parts).
- In some cases, once broken down the tasks, it could prove to be helpful to assign them accordingly to the members of the group. The importance of distributing the skills and methods of the group members allows for more interaction and broader investigation.
One of the greatest challenges within group projects is to find effective apps and tools to get the group communicate, draft his work and submit the final work. You may find the following TOOLS helpful.
To help your students interact and start collaborating:
- DISCUSSION FORUMS and WIKIS available on LMS.
- EMAIL and texting apps such as Whatsapp and Slack.
To start drafting their task:
- Shared documents — Google Docs, Dropbox et-c…
To present their work (depending on the type of presentations):
- Microsoft Sway (SlideShare).
- Genially (Interactive SlideShare).
- Canva and Adobe Spark (for infographics and videos).
Check out our Ed Toolkit for information on interesting apps.