Records and Reflection on Group Collaborative Writing Task (Week 5 Autonomy)
An Introduction to the Group Collaborative Task
Our group chose the first question “How does technology scaffold autonomous learning strategies?” to answer. Each of us takes a role separately since we have four people in our group. The tool we choose for brainstorming is Tricider website and the tool for writing this essay is Stormboard website.
Our Experience in Applying Tricider and Stormboard
Figure 1 shows what we brainstorm in our minds. The advantages of Tricider are that it provides a platform that allows people in different places to share, comment on and vote for ideas for free. The page is clear to exhibit group members’ ideas and favor for specific views.
Then we use Stormboard for organizing ideas. At first, the first drafter proposed that she could paste information from Tricider website to Stormboard so that group members can have a better view of all ideas. When she typed on Stormboard page and asked for agreement from others, they answered her also by typing directly on the same page. This is an advantage of this website which provided a shared page for both editing ideas and expressing agreements and disagreements spontaneously. While pasting, others began drawing a mind map by the Sticker button on the website. However, the pasted information and mind map were put in the same section so the first drafter worried about the mixture and inconvenience of recognizing suitable information of each part. So she advised the information could be listed in Section 1 and the stickers in Section 2. Owing to the fact that only the benefits of technology were shown in Tricider, she suggested disadvantages should also be involved. In the end, we got figure 2.
Evaluation on Online Collaborative Writing
Because it was our first time using Stormboard, we encountered difficulties in communicating with each other, such as group members not knowing what the tasks were and how to divide up the work. Tricider's interface was clearer and more straightforward, plus we had used it in class to discuss the arrangements for the end-of-class party activities, so we were able to express our views in a more familiar way. The high degree of freedom of the Stormboard page made it difficult to organize the scattered and disorganized text we typed out at the beginning, but the group members overcame this problem by brainstorming, and the final result shown in figure 2 was produced.
Hi sweet heart! this is a lovely blog, I enjoyed reading the Evaluation part! and I can see you have mentioned some advantages which is great! can you add more about how can teachers adopt this tool? and maybe provide a video if you want? what do you think?
ReplyDeleteThis blog is a true account of our entire process of collaborative writing, especially the problems and resolution strategies we faced while working together using Tricider and Stormboard, and some of the scenarios are still fresh in my mind haha. I especially appreciated your comparison of the two tools, this kind of reflection from concrete practice is invaluable.
ReplyDeleteIf I may make a suggestion, I would encourage you to summarise a little bit in the ‘Evaluation’ section, e.g. what is your overall understanding of online collaboration tools from this experience? Would you recommend it to other teachers or students? A short, reflective closing sentence can make for a more natural conclusion. I've also written a related blog entry, so feel free to check it out and comment! 🤓
I liked how clearly you described each step, especially how you identified the strengths of each tool. Your use of Tricider for structured idea sharing and voting sounds effective, and I found it helpful that you mentioned how prior experience with the tool made collaboration easier. The challenges you faced with Stormboard also resonated with me—too much freedom can sometimes lead to confusion at first. But it’s great to see how your group worked through that by organizing content into separate sections and ensuring both pros and cons were considered. This reflection gives a very balanced and practical view of using digital tools for collaborative writing.
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