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On average, how many emails do you get from students complaining about group work? How much time do you spend dealing with issues of student collaboration, accountability and time management? If this sounds familiar, you should try introducing students to collaborative platforms for their group assessments.

Collaborative platforms are currently trending. The abundance of them, ranging from kan boards, mind mapping and project management tools gives students the opportunity to communicate more efficiently and better contribute to their group work for assessments.

Here’s a list of four collaboration tools I’ve found whilst undertaking my undergraduate studies, which students can use to assist with group assessments:

MindMapping with MindMeister  unknown

Turn ideas into agile projects. Collaborative mindmapping software, MindMeister allows students to:

  • Brainstorm together simultaneously in real-time
  • Innovatively present and build on project concepts in one online interactive space
  • Make mindmaps interactive by enriching them with links, attachments, videos and more to strengthen and provide evidence based concept development
  • Import and export mindmaps in various formats

Communicating through Slack 

Students need to cslack-notifications-mobile-2xommunicate in order to collaborate. Slack is an intuitive, user-friendly team messaging platform. It’s modern and familiar, and is what Slack describes as ‘team communication of the 21st century’. In a nutshell it allows students to easily:

  • Communicate through channels for different topics, teams and projects
  • Video call and direct message their peers
  • Drag and drop to share their group files
  • Archive old chats to keep records of all team communication

In this way Slack could help to streamline group work communication by fostering increased online team collaboration.

G-Suite to create real-time resources

c_yzipoxuaaxdw3Write, edit and collaborate in real-time with docs, sheets, slides and more, anytime and anywhere. Students can save time on downloading offline versions of Word docs, PowerPoints and Excel sheets by using Google’s G-suite. G-suite gives students the power to:

  • Collaboratively create, edit and present resources or assignments in real-time with their group members
  • Chat and comment to interact with their team members and provide critical feedback
  • Never hit ‘save’ again as changes are saved automatically as you type
  • Access revision history to track team workloads and sections

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Asana, Meistertask or Bootcamp for team planning, tracking and collaboration

Encourage students to get on top of collaborative task management platforms for smarter project management. Platforms such as Asana, Meistertask and Basecamp just to name a few enable teams to:

  • Plan, track and coordinate tasks
  • Manage workloads, project workflows and create task automations
  • Assign and monitor deadlines to team members
  • Upload attachments or link to team resources

By strategically planning out their projects on these collaborative project management platforms, it will help students to understand the importance of collegiality, time management and being organised.

Keen to get a quick breakdown of other handy tools? Check out my other blog post about Top tools to keep you organised – Part 1.

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