Applications for supporting collaboration in the classroom

Abstract

In recent years, many applications have become available for supporting collaboration between students in a course. This presentation offers an overview of several of them, so that new engineering educators can judge which they might be interested in adopting. All of the tools discussed are free for instructors and their students, at least at the entry level. We first discuss applications (Twitter and Live Question) for sharing questions and answers among students and between instructor and students during a class. For out-of-class questions, the social-networking application Piazza is powerful and easy to use. PollEverywhere and ChimeIn are two applications that let the instructor send questions to the students and automatically record and check their answers. Google forms provide some of the same functionality for free and without the need to install software on a server. Google forms can also be used to survey students. SALG is a specialized survey program to assess how much students have learned. For taking graphical feedback from students on tablet computers during class, Classroom Presenter and Ubiquitous Presenter are two open-source tools. The most widely used peer-review application is Calibrated Peer Review. Expertiza is a peer-review system that incorporates functionality for topic selection and team formation by students. Wikis are a well known collaborative space, which can be used by students to write reports and other documents cooperatively. Google docs serve much the same function, allowing more flexibility but less uniformity in formatting. More powerful features are available through Google sites, which allow the instructor to set up templates to track student progress, including the time that they have spent on the project. CATME/Team Maker is a tool for creating teams based on student schedules or other criteria, and collecting feedback from team members on the contributions of their partners. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.