StudyBlue™ created the ability for students to share virtual 'backpacks' with their classmates, enabling collaboration of a flashcard database for their specific course, text or discipline. The collaborative features of StudyBlue™ are part of what earned them a place in the 2012 listing of T op 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning, awarded by the American Association of School Librarians (Habley, 2012). My skepticism waned.Īs I pondered other ways that students might be able to work 'together' from a distance, I discovered StudyBlue™. Complaints related to 'social loafing' subsided. Suddenly, students were contributing more, creating more as a group, instead of relying on one person to compile the project, and completing projects within the time frames assigned. Everyone has access to all of the articles and other resources for the project and can add resources at any time. In a project group, each student is able to go to the document stored in Evernote™ and edit or revise, thus eliminating thefrustration students often have in relation to coordinating schedules to arrange meeting times for group work. Students may record information in text, audio or visual format with text being searchable within images.

It allows users to type notes into an Evernote™ notebook and access those notes from anywhere. Evernote™ is a free service available on most electronic devices.

I discovered a product called Evernote™ that allows students to share virtual 'notebooks' so they can compile materials for group projects in one place. I began to seek out various on-line tools to encourageinteraction and collaborative work. Continued effectiveness in the classroom would require new skills and adjustments on my part. However, I arrived at the realization that students today, even good students, were simply unable to adequately assimilate information with traditional, instructor-driven, models. Like many professors 'of a certain age,' the transition from lecture based, traditional classroom models to technology inclusive, collaborative approaches to adult learning did not come easily or naturally for me. Online Collaboration Through Evernote: A New Group Format

Evernote student projects