Rowing the boat of learning collaboratively through Conceptboard: Addressing the demands of online teaching and learning

The covid-19 pandemic has caused to emerge unprecedented situations in the education field. When the situation is better, regular face-to-face classes are held but when it starts deteriorating, those are shifted to various online platforms. In many countries of Southeast Asia, this has become a circular process because of which many teachers cannot maintain consistency in following lesson plans and implementing classroom activities. As you know the classroom interaction pattern and student engagement vary to a great extent between face-to-face and online classes. Teachers will hardly disagree that ensuring a standard level of classroom interaction and enhancing collaboration among students is one of the most frequently mentioned challenges in online classes in recent times. It is frustrating for the teachers, let’s say in the productive skills teaching classes, to see the bar of class learning outcome getting dropped. In this respect, it becomes a challenge for the teacher to get the best outcome from the activities. Here, a collaboration among the students can decrease the doom of motionlessness in the class. But how to engage them to collaborate in online (or even offline) sessions? Let’s open the magical treasure box of technology to find out what’s there to improve the situation.

Hmm, I can see many options…Mindmaster, then Tricider, next Scribbler, oh Padlet is there… then-Yes! I have found it- Conceptboard!

Collaboration in Conceptboard

Conceptboard is a virtual and visual workplace where learners will be able to brainstorm on a topic, prepare a flow chart on a process, outline a framework for a project or draft a presentation proposal collaboratively with other students.

Please mark the word ‘collaboration’. The simple rationale for collaboration lies in the notion of ‘unity is strength’: the more united the students, the stronger their concepts become. If you are not convinced at this point, Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory is ready for giving you a boost! With the practice of ‘meaningful’ interaction, knowledge and understanding can be co-constructed. Not only that, Lave and Wenger (1991) further develop this point by stating that collaborative classroom learning helps to formulate longer lasing social relationships in the academic context. Therefore, collaborative learning is not only working together but also scaffolding and guiding each other to achieve a definite goal.

Sometimes, collaborative classroom activity can be the best option for bigger writing/speaking projects like writing an academic report or presenting an institutional renovation proposal. In these types of projects, students are expected to explore vaster dimensions and use more multimodal platforms than those for writing essays or oral presentations. Hence, as the saying goes, two minds can plan better than one, the collaboration among students can ensure diverse ideas from many minds to accomplish a multidimensional task.

What’s there

It’s really worth introducing the students to this tool because it provides immense opportunities to work collaboratively in an engaging manner rather than sitting idly and inactively while hiding their faces behind their online IDs.

It is just perfect for group tasks in online classes. It provides numerous features for the users to work together and visualize their concepts through the options of live cursors, infinite canvas, content upload, drawing tools, comments and sticky notes, and easy board sharing. Apart from image and element insertion support, this tool also provides an opportunity to utilize any audio or video file.

You can either log in with your Gmail account or you can create a separate account and then log in.  Then one user in the group can create a concept board for working together and can share the link or QR code with other members of the group so that they can join. Here, audio and video calls are also supported in the system along with a simple chat.

A sample task

Here, I have designed a classroom task that can be guided to completion by using the Conceptboard.

Instruction for students

Suppose your institution currently does not have any separate food corner for students. As a result, you have to go outside of the campus to find foods which is time-consuming and the quality of those foods are not satisfactory. Now, write a report to the director of your institute my mentioning how you plan to solve students’ problems by proposing a framework for establishing a food court at the institution premises.

Instructions for teachers

At first, ask the students to work in groups of four and within groups, pick one of the following sub-topics on which they want to work:

•     What would be the possible benefits of the food court?
•     What can be some of the obstacles in establishing it?
•     How many supporting staffs are needed to run it? In which location?
•     Which food items would be available? Why?

Next, ask them to log in to https://conceptboard.com/  and start brainstorming collaboratively on the given points. After each of them finishes working on their own part, ask them to fine-tune all the points in groups to prepare a draft framework for the food court. Finally, you can ask them to present their draft framework in the class and give a deadline for submitting their final group reports online.

Features

This is what a simple concept board looks like. Learners can work on creating a process-oriented stage-by-stage framework by inserting available graphics and charts in the Building block option. Moreover, they can use texts, scribblers, sticky notes, and comment boxes to brainstorm in a more organized and diverse way.

Not only that, they can also upload pictures and shapes from their device collections which would help them in personalizing the platform and in turn, will motivate them to engage more in the task.

Limitations

As there are various operations hidden under numerous icons, while using it for the first time, students may get overwhelmed and feel lost. In this regard, a little bit of teacher guidance can work as their savior.

When we say it’s an online class, we know that the students who have attended have a device and internet connection. However, in the context of Bangladesh, it would be ambitious to think that each student of the class possesses a laptop and has access to high-quality internet service. As you can presume, some students attend online classes from their mobile phones and have a very unstable internet connection. Since the Conceptboard works the best on laptop or tablet screens and demands a fast and stable internet connection because of the multimodal applications embedded in it, the under-privilege students may face challenges while using it. Lastly, like many other online tools, it’s not free: if you want to access its ‘pro’ features, you need to pay.

Anyways, now you know the pros and cons of the Conceptboard: it’s your turn to decide which one weighs more. I hope you understand what I mean 😉