Collaborative Tools for Active Learning

Jennifer Reed is finding ways to engage students with active learning whether the classroom furniture is conducive to it or not. Technology can facilitate energy, engagement and collaboration in real time, even in large classes.

Jennifer Reed is a full time lecturer and graduate student coordinator in mathematics and statistics at UNC Charlotte.

In an active learning classroom, Jennifer Reed has her students up, walking around, and engaging with mathematics. Her classrooms are buzzing with excitement and students are getting connected with one another. 

Unlike passive learning, active learning engages students directly, boosting knowledge retention, critical thinking, and collaboration. Gateway math courses often have high failure rates, lacking clear relevance to students’ future careers and remaining a major barrier to degree completion and equitable outcomes for millions of students. Research has consistently confirmed that active learning works. Not just one subject area or educational level but across many different contexts. And specifically in STEM fields, the evidence is powerful. A major study by Freeman and colleagues in 2014 found that failure rates dropped from 33.8% in lecture-based settings to just 21.8% with active learning incorporated. And that’s major improvement; it shows just how powerful active learning strategies can be when implemented thoughtfully. 

Active learning doesn’t just help students pass their courses either. It also helps them build critical thinking skills and become more engaged in their learning. Research by Doolittle and colleagues in 2023 showed that critical thinking skills improved by an average of 42%, and student engagement rose over 50% when active learning strategies were used. What’s even more exciting is that when digital tools are thoughtfully integrated into the classroom, these benefits become even stronger.

Digital Resources

Google Docs, Google Sheets, Canva, Excel

One of the things that Jennifer usually assigns her statistics students is a project where they have to work with other students. In order to keep accountability and make sure that all students are participating, Jennifer uses Google Docs to facilitate that active learning. She provides students with a link to a Google Doc template with questions to be answered for the assignment. Students are put into groups, and on the shared document, each student is represented by a color-coded piece for their name. So if they were to be number one, they might be blue and throughout the entire document, that student would be typing their answers to the questions in blue. Someone else might have typed their name in the slot number five, which was red. They would then have all of their typed pieces that they’re contributing in red for the document. 

Reed’s students have also used Google Sheets or Excel to do collaborative work that includes a lot of calculations. Student teams are given a template to work with, with prompts and questions to answer; this spreadsheet template is shared with them through their LMS. Google Sheets and Excel lack the color coding capability that Google Docs has, but instructors can still look at the history of the document, much like with Google Sheets. If it was used with collaborations in Excel, then instructors can also pull up and see how contributions were made. 

Another collaborative project Jennifer Reed uses in her classes is a poster project where students are using Canva together during class. Students come up with a question to gather data about how they can run their hypothesis test. They discuss with their group their questions to be sure they’re meeting all the qualifications, and then are given 10 minutes in the classroom to gather data from which to run their hypothesis test. They then analyze their data together in their groups, and each member puts their data in a Google Sheet and then sends it to another group member to then analyze. Students are able to do their analysis themselves, and then share and let someone else check their analysis and ensure that they were doing their calculations correctly. Students then put all of their content into a poster where they provide background, a problem statement or question, data results, and an interpretation of those results to answer their question. 

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Digital Enablement

Using shared documents makes it very easy for Reed to quickly look over the document, first of all, to see that all students contributed. Second, it allows her to keep students held accountable to each other in the group to ensure that they’re actually doing the work. A great thing about Google Docs is that if you go into the document history, you can actually see when students contribute and what color they’re using. Reed tells students this up front: she will know if just one person typed all the work in different colors because it’ll be in the history of the document.

When incorporating Excel or Google Sheets into in-class projects, the technology quickly supports the mathematical pieces by doing the calculating for students. Students have to decide what calculations to do, and have to come to their own conclusions and understandings, but the calculations are done efficiently using technology. This allows Reed to have students complete an entire mini-project within one class meeting.

Reed finds that many students like to use Canva because it allows for collaboration, and students can use these visual representations to show exactly what they’ve connected mathematically to what they are trying to answer; most students relate their work to a global goal that they’re trying to find some type of solution for. Digital tools allow Reed to get students collaborating, learning, and having fun in an easy and timely manner.

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