Student as Producer

Using PowerPoint collaboratively via a shared document is an ideal way to collate group work in a way that facilitates jigsaw activities.

A jigsaw activity involves a cohort being divided up into groups with each group being given their own topic/area/element on which to work. Each group researches and develops content on their assigned topic before feeding back to the class. By providing students with access to a collaborative PowerPoint document, where each group has their own slide or section of slides to populate, information can be easily collated into one document that all students can access and use for learning and revision purposes after the session.

The same approach can be used for other MS programmes such as MS Word and MS Whiteboard.

MS Sway allows students to collate and present content in a range of formats, including text, images, video, and embedding documents. By permitted students to create their work within Sway, you are affording them a range of options that allows them to choose the formats with which they feel most confident, or they feel best conveys or demonstrates their work.

The formatting tools within Sway are somewhat limited, but this means that students have to spend relatively little time learning how to use the programme and can focus their efforts on the quality of the content and the other elements they’re embedding within the Sway.

Sway can also be shared in the same way other MS 365 documents are so students can work individually or collaboratively depending on the task.

When involving students in choosing and/or guiding their own learning journey, it’s important to have a way to both collect student opinions and preferences about the path they take and checking student confidence and competency along the way.

MS Forms provides an efficient means by which to collect and review data. Using the variety of question types and branching options, you can create surveys and/or quizzes that allow learners to select their chosen option and then answer the relevant questions. You may, for example, get students to select an area they’d most like to study or research from several options, students then carry out the associated task, before responding to the relevant questions within the Form as evidence of the completed work. The data from the Form will allow you to monitor engagement and participation from students.

Building on this approach, you may also choose to incorporate a quiz into the workflow. Quizzes with set answers can be automatically marked, thereby enabling students to check their own knowledge but also records their responses so that you are able to monitor student progress and identify any students that need additional support or any particular topics where further instruction may be required.