You can have as many Groups in NowComment as you want. Anyone can create a Group; students can create their own study and project groups without any admin work required from the Instructor.
Here are a few ideas for adding collaborative group experiences to your NowComment assignments:
This is most useful with texts posing problems that are highly subjective (many possible answers or approaches, none clearly right or clearly wrong).
Teams/workgroups are created to be small enough for everyone in the group to be actively involved in online commenting to work through the challenges posed by the document being discussed. At the end of the commenting period each group chooses a representative to verbally present its findings to the class (in miniature, Think-Pair-Share). If desired, the groups can then meet again to discuss the new ideas presented by the other groups.
Example: The “Bomb Shelter” exercise
Groups work on different texts or different parts of a large text (“Jigsawing”)
Small teams/workgroups as above, but each group takes a different piece, and the groups take turns reporting their findings to the class as a whole. This is most useful when each text presents different information and the group “assembles” the information presented by each group.
Example: When studying an animal, one group presents the key ideas about its habitat, another group its lifecycle, another group it’s place in the food chain, etc.
Peer Writing Review (Workshopping)
For both research papers and creative writing, it’s been very effective to have students critique each other’s first drafts.
Example: (with permission of the Emory University students):
http://nowcomment.com/documents/9525
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