Real-Time Collaborative Writing

Projected image of the document just before completion

In ICT recently the children have been learning about how the internet has changed communication and how people interact. We started by looking at how the internet has changed how a group works together.

We looked at two situations. The children had to pretend they were in a group of three and had to discuss how they could complete a document together on a single sheet of A3. We then discussed how the situation would change if we had 10 children all trying to work on the same document at the same time.

We then looked at how the internet actually
allows those situations to work! The children were asked to create a variety of documents depending on their class. Some attempted scripts, some attempted narrative stories while others attempted non-fiction texts. In ever example though, every document had not less than 12 children simultaneously contributing to our collaborative documents. Each "team" can be seen in the images here as being represented by different colours of text.

The children found the activity an eye-opener and challenging but also great fun!