Evidence suggests peer collaboration really motivates pupils, especially when learning remotely.
Brindley, Laschke and Walti 2009 state that:
“There is a significant relationship between participation in small group collaboration experiences and deeper learning. Peer collaboration aids the development of learning and teamwork skills. It can increase a sense of community, closely linked to learner satisfaction and retention, as knowledge is co-created and shared amongst peers, not owned by one particular learner.”
Strategies to support this:
1.Chat function: Using the chat function within various platforms or apps like Showbie can enable pupils to give peer support with tasks, planning and homework questions they are stuck on.
2. One Drive: A powerful tool to facilitate peer collaboration (as is google docs), pupils can collaborate live on a task, or planning an essay question or creating a revision aid. They can also then peer assess one another and take an opportunity to uplift their work. Teachers can view live pupil progress and praise or support where necessary.
3. Padlet: A versatile tool to enable pupils to collaborate remotely. Using the timeline feature pupils can create great summaries of texts by taking ownership for a chapter each and uploading high quality revision materials or summaries. It can also be used in column format to set up a way for pupils to collaborate when planning a question or silent debate.
4. Virtual whiteboards: There are many platforms out there to gauge pupil feedback virtually, one is whiteboard.fi. Pupils can all respond to teacher questions on their whiteboard; all boards can be shared to enable pupils to peer assess, expose common misconceptions or improve their own answers.
Here is a summary of all remote learning tips shared so far.