Learning is not the solitary experience it once might have been; sharing is encouraged, and working together a key skill.

Using collaborative online tools enhances this working together by allowing for learning partnerships within the classroom, the school, the local area, nationally and internationally. Whether using a blog to report, reflect and invite comment on learning, using a wiki as a working space or online scrapbook, using Voicethread to gather thoughts from across the world or Wallwisher to assess what pupils have learned; collaboration is a great way to support language learning.

Questions

-With whom might you collaborate?

-What are the advantages for you and your pupils of collaboration?

-Which themes lend themselves well to collaboration?

Activity

When you want to assess what pupils have learned in a particular unit, why not use one of the collaborative tools and invite them to post a brief response in text, sound, image or a combination of these. This allows pupils to work independantly, the teacher to target pupils for support, and all the responses to be collected in one place for peer assessment and AfL.