The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is both an annual event and a year-round online discussion of ways that faculty and staff are using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research.
Research shows that better communication among team or group members is key to any group project completion. The challenge for educators is often to ensure that all students contribute, track students' contribution in groups, and reduce the time spent in solving conflicts in the team. Assigning roles to students and providing some sort of structure is regularly the approach to facilitate collaboration within groups. This session will introduce a free web-based tool that would allow teachers to turn group work and collaboration into an enjoyable experience and improve communication among group members, while preparing students for the real world.
The session will begin with a discussion, where attendees will be asked, based on their experiences, to mention problems in team/group work. Drawing from the list provided by attendees, ideas from the audience will be gathered as to what technology they have used to address group or collaboration issues identified. Participants will then be asked to share their experiences with these technologies, the effect on the students’ overall learning experience during group work, and what they wish the technologies would have allowed them to do.
At the end of this discussion, the audience will be introduced to Slack to help them facilitate group communication and collaboration in their classes. Attendees will create groups using Slack, and use some integrated features that this application provides. They will be shown different ways of using this tool to facilitate group work, and assess group dynamic.