The collabrification of educational apps continues! Joining
WeMap (concept mapping for iOS and Android) and WeKWL (KWL charting for iOS and
Android), we welcome WeWrite+ (text editing) and WeSketch+ (drawing and
animating – and ANIMATING!) to the suite of collabrified educational
productivity tools available, free, for iPads.
(What the heck is “collabrification”? Read our short blog post: Web 2.0
to Social 3.0 – The Next Big Thing)
(Facts of life: (1) We needed to add a + to their names
since WeWrite and WeSketch were already taken; sorry for the confusion this
will invariably cause! (2) Currently, there are only iOS versions of WeWrite+
and WeSketch+; we are finishing work on their Android cousins – we should be
posting them by December, 2014. Yay! And, just as the iOS and Android versions
of WeMap and the iOS and Android versions of WeKWL “inter-operate” – one
student can be on an iPad and one on an Android device, and both students can
still work together on their concept map or on their KWL chart – the iOS and
the Android versions of WeWrite+ and the iOS and the Android versions of
WeSketch+ will also be inter-operable. Androiders: thank you for your
patience.)
WeWrite+ is a vanilla text editor. Currently, it just
supports two or more students working together in real-time as co-authors of a
document, where each student is writing on his or her own iPad. There are two
situations in which WeWrite+ can be used:
Learners are co-located:
In this situation, the collaborating students are in the same classroom,
sitting next to each other. In collaborative writing, it is critically
important that the students talk to each other. Why? In a word: coordination.
Assuming just two students are collaborating, if they aren’t talking to each
other pretty constantly, then invariably one will “step” on the other’s work –
erase it, change it. But when the collaborators talk to each other, this sort
of inadvertent collision doesn’t tend to happen.
Learners are not co-located: In this situation, one student
is at home, sitting at their kitchen table while their collaborator is at their
home, perhaps sitting in their bedroom. WeWrite+ doesn’t care where the
collaborators are located; WeWrite+ works just fine in this situation. BUT, in
order to support the constant conversation, we suggest using Google Hangouts.
Hangouts is a free download (iOS and Android) that supports two or more users
(up to 10, in fact) engaging in video or audio conversation. Frankly, it is an
amazing app! Skype can also be used, but
the free version only supports audio chat. When not co-located, we suggest the
students start-up Hangouts (or Skype) first, and then start-up WeWrite+.
Hangouts (Skype) runs in the background providing support for verbal
conversation, while WeWrite+ runs in the foreground providing support for
collaborative writing.
Note: The above suggestions for supporting collaboration
when students are not co-located applies not only to WeWrite+ but to our other
collabrified apps: WeMap, WeKWL, and the new WeSketch+.
In this blog, we are simply announcing the availability of
two new collabrified apps. That’s the easy part, actually. In another blog we
will make curricular suggestions on how and when to use these two collabrified
apps – and how to help your students learn to collaborate!
For example, in the beginning of the school year, we have
observed that students, when using a collabrified app, do not really know how
to talk to each other in a civil, collaborative fashion. The boys, in fact,
tend to not talk at all! But, by the end
of the school year, the students have learned how to engage in a collaborative
conversation – complete with disagreement and peaceful resolution. (Sometimes rock-paper-scissors is the best
way to resolve a dispute amongst collaborators!) Pretty interesting – students DO learn!!
If you are interested in using our collabrified apps, please
drop us an email. (Click on ES, above) We are putting together a community of
“collabrified app using teachers” since
it is especially important at this early stage, that we share our observations,
our curricular activities, and our instructional strategies for how and when to
use collabrified apps in the classroom.
But, while these are early days, we stand by our earlier
prediction: In three years, every app will be collabrified. While one can
certainly use an app in solo mode, apps will, with the tap of a finger, enable
a user to connect, live, to another user, so the users can work together, in
real-time. The collabrification of apps
(and websites, but that’s another discussion) is underway – and is inevitable!
That’s good news, actually: virtually all learners, when
working alone, hit a point where they get “stuck” – get confused, lose
motivation, etc. But, with a collabrified app, that learning impasse can be
easily addressed: a finger tap brings in a collaborator – and the collaborator
sees on his or her screen exactly what the “stuckee” is seeing. Together, the
stuckee and the collaborator can work through the confusion, the
misunderstanding. Indeed, a learner never has to learn alone again!
