Lesson 7: Collaboration with Digital Channels

 March 10th, 2021

The main objectives of this lesson were:

• To be aware of the channels to connect with others and to collaborate by digital tools with the end of interaction. 
• To be able to use the technology and tools to work in a team, to create collaborative projects and to create and to build common resources, knowledges and contents. 
• To know and to use collaborative tools such as forums and wikis. To take part of sharing public spaces. 
• To control and to share teaching contents by software collaborative tools.

During this class we talked about digital collaboration which refers to the use of digital tools with the aim of collaborate. Current digital tools and the Internet let high number of people to communicate in between them and to share contents and to work in the same way to get a shared goal. The concept “online collaboration” is directly related to “digital collaboration”, whose meaning is similar, but the field of application that is only and exclusively the Internet. 

There are also video tools for digital collaboration which refer to tools that allow us to interact with others through video (with one or more people) - video conferencing between one or more people (two-way, since both transmit) or webinars in one direction, where one person transmits and the rest see (one-way). Those transmissions can be private for a few chosen people or public, any person with the link can watch the transmission, and even participate. Some examples are Zoom, Skype, Google Meets, etc. 

There are also documents by google docs or even forums where other individuals can express their thoughts and opinions about a specific question or discussion topic. In addition, there are chats, blogs and wikis where we can post anything we would like ranging from posts about a subject we are interested in that we want to share with others to an assignment our teacher wants to view alongside your classmates. 

For the individual assignment for this class we had to respond to the question “What do you think about parents sharing pictures of their young children on their social networks?” in a forum in the virtual classroom with our thoughts. We were able to see what all of the other students had posted and could comment on each others posts if we wanted to. 

In addition, we had to go to Aula Virtual “Wiki ICT” and edit the page of your group to talk about a specific topic of your didactic unit. each member of the group should participate from their account by writing some content. In the image below we are observe the wiki post that I created about concentration. For this wiki post I made use of the techniques such as using = = for the main title ** for putting words in bold and * for putting them into bullet points. This made it much easier to style and edit the post and made it more aesthetically pleasing for the eye. 

Overall, I think this lesson was really useful as we got to know all the possible ways we could collaborate in a digital way. This is going to help us in the future not only for our group project but as teachers as we are going to be able to use these techniques and tools to make collaboration easier in an online platform for our class. Also, it was nice to put these topics to practice with the forum and the wiki page as we are able to practice these skills instead of just learning the theory about it.