Katherine Senko

Blended learning is the process of incorporating digital technology and tools into traditional learning environments. It would be truly unusual for anyone to use anything other than digital for documents; the new position is to easily create digital documents with more than one author. Collaboration is an important skill for all to learn (check out previous post) but can be difficult to manage. The change tracking, the actual authors vs. those who simply comment, the editors… How can all of this sharing be done with ease? Luckily, there are many tools to aid with this.

MS Word does offer tracking solutions, but too often if more than one author is working on the document simultaneously a version is lost. Version control becomes a nightmare. A better solution is GoogleDocs (https://www.google.com/docs/about/) where authors can work on the same piece at the same time and changes are kept.

Another great tool is using a Wikispaces (https://www.wikispaces.com). Wikispaces allows students to collaborate with writing and has a nice social network feed. It also allows for easy student progress checks and a classroom tool for teachers.

The previously mentioned tools are great for documents but a blended learning classroom often allows for different media. Moxtra (http://www.moxtra.com) allows multiple binders to be kept on a project and neatly organizes who does what and when. Binders are shareable and searchable. Prezi (https://prezi.com) allows multiple users to work on a presentation. Group presentations become unified with one theme on one giant canvas. Simply zoom to your portion. Presentation can include links to other sites as well as video and audio clips too.

Search the net for free shareable projects. Thousands of solutions are out there waiting for your class to explore. Even make it an assignment for different groups to evaluate different products. What is more real world learning than that?