Using Google Docs to Facilitate 21st Century Collaboration

Judith Bilinger, Washington State Superintendent said “Children are the Priority. Change is the reality.  Collaboration is the strategy.”  I think this quote could be seen as a call to respond to the challenges and changes of the 21^st century by collaborating with other educators and also as a call to foster collaboration among our students.  For the past two weeks this has been on my mind and seems to have cropped up as a theme at every turn. 

In the Additional Qualification course I am taking through the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario I’ve been enjoying using Google Docs to collaborate with two colleagues who live far apart on a list of Language, Math, Coding and Integration resources for the Junior Level.  It has been an overly busy two weeks.  I had my coursework, my teaching, lots of assessment to do in preparation for report cards, E.Q.A.O. and in the middle a whole weekend at the EdTech Team’s London #gafesummit.  My members were equally busy and our individual schedules were totally at odds with one another.  Despite the challenges of time and distance we were able to work together in a truly collaborative manner.  We began by contacting one another through email, but once a Google doc had been opened and shared, we were able to communicate exclusively in the comments section at the side of our assignment.  It was absolutely seamless.

More and more 21^st Century workplaces do their projects this way.  Team members can be found at all corners of the globe in all different time zones and languages.  Collaborative platforms like Google Docs with Google Translate can make such teamwork possible.  Given this new workplace reality, this model must be extended to the classroom to ensure that students will be adequately prepared to work as effective members of a multinational team.  As a teacher I have often used cooperative learning up to the point of summative assessment, when I felt it necessary to switch to an individual task.  How else could I judge individual performance?  Well, that shift is no longer needed.  I can simply look at the history of the Google Doc to see exactly what each student contributed.  So, now students can work collaboratively at each stage of learning and I can still assess their individual contributions.