Digital collaborative writing to motivate students

Have you ever tried collaborative writing with your students? Digital makes this much easier. Here are some ideas. (First of two parts)

Collaborative writing allows young people to collaborate on an online writing project, share their opinions and receive real-time feedback. Several methods, approaches and sharing tools are available to create innovative and motivating writing projects in the classroom.

In these collaborative writing projects, the usually personal aspect of the act of writing is enriched by the constructive gaze of the other. Several skills are developed, such as planning, teamwork, argumentation and text revision. In addition, interdisciplinarity can also be used by integrating, for example, photography, drawing or video.

Here are some examples of collaborative writing projects.

Educational chat

The educational chat allows the sharing of comments and written interaction between students. Texts written in collaboration promote the acquisition of several skills and motivation to write.

Since chat is popular among young people, the doctoral student and lecturer at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Marie-Ève Gonthier, devoted her thesis to the use of chat in writing a text. Pupils from special education classes in secondary school participated in the study. The doctoral student shared her results of his research last September during the Congress of Canadian Association for French Language Education (ACELF). Chat with free software Etherpad was employed as part of a writing project and allowed young people to plan the structure of their text, write, edit, share their comments and advise their peers, all from a perspective of mutual aid.

Etherpad, just like Framapad and many others, are tools where all connected people can make changes, suggest and comment in real time. Everyone's contributions are identified by a specific color and chat is built into the tool.

Marie-Ève Gonthier also offers in her presentation avenues of activities to explore with educational chat: taking turns writing, debates between two students, correspondence with other classes, collaboration with other schools and teamwork.

Three other ideas for collaborative writing projects will be shared starting tomorrow! To be continued! Until then, which ones do you prefer? Feel free to share them using the comments module!