You create groups of three in your class and want students to build 'collaboration' while working on a language assignment. Which of the following ICT based activities can most help the purpose?

Option 2 : Students in each group create a Google document to write an essay building on each other's thoughts.

Collaboration means ‘to work jointly with others, especially in an intellectual endeavor. It means association, teamwork, joint effort, or partnership. Collaboration is a process where two or more people think and work together towards a common purpose.

Tools for Collaborative learning: The tools for collaborative learning may be classified as offline tools and online tools.​

• ICT-based tools are those tools that are used when connected to the Internet. The activities in which these tools are used are called ICT-based activities.
• These include email, cloud-hosted applications, such as messengers, blogs, bulletin boards, discussion forums, wikis, social media, etc. You can access these tools on your computer, laptop, tablet, mobile, or other hand-held devices when connected to the Internet.
• Creating a Google document to write an essay building on each other's thoughts while working in a group can MOST help the purpose of collaborative learning as it will ensure the active participation of students by working in a group and applying practical knowledge to complete an activity.
• Here, the students are writing an essay building on each other's thoughts, hence, they are attempting to learn something together. This type of learning is helpful in the development of critical thinking.
• It is believed that individuals are able to achieve higher levels of learning and retain more information when they work in a group rather than individually. It promotes 'learning by doing' to make children self-reliant and productive.

Hint

• In the rest options, students are involved in ICT-based activities using ICT-based tools but they are not working collaboratively. They are involved in their own work by working individually.​

From the above points, we can conclude that 'Students in each group create a Google document to write an essay building on each other's thoughts' is the correct answer in the context of the question.

• Offline tools are those media that can be used on an isolated computer, which is not connected to the Internet.
• These include softcopies of the documents, slides, illustrations, audio, and video files, which can be stored in your computer and distributed through transfer devices, such as data transfer cables, hard drives, memory sticks, CDs, etc.