Collaboration Tools for ELT Class

Have you ever thought of building a chat room for students to discuss some topics out of class? Have you ever considered of asking the students complete a task like writing an essay together out of class? All these activities may seem difficult, but they are not so tough with those collaboration tools online.

I'd like to suggest three online tools that the students can use to complete collaborate tasks. The first one is Stormboard. 

 Stormboard is a place you can create a board where others can be invited to post a discuss. Everyone can post their literatures in a particular colour, so it is easy to recognise.  The host of the storm has the right to edit those posts. What's more there's a special column for participants to chat together before they post anything on the storm, so the storm board will not turn to a chat board.
The benefits of the stormboard is obvious. It is easy to edit ideas of every participants and can be exported as Words, PDF and Excel files. As a result, students don't need to waste time on copying all the contents.
 The second tool is Mopad. This tool is especially for learners who need to complete an essay or report together. Usually when learners need to write an essay together, they will write own part separately, and then read each others and revise. This traditional way is not so efficient, because the learners waste a lot of time on reading and rewrite. Using this tool can help learners to save time and discuss their opinions even they don't have time to sit together. This tool also has a column for chatting, so participants can discuss their parts together before adding any words on the pad. Every Pad has a leader editor who can organise and edit the article into a final draft.
In ELT classrooms, this is a great tool for students learn from each other. Because they can see how others organise words and sentences.

The final one is Google drive. I think everyone knows it. It is a tool for sharing any materials like photos, office files, videos and PDF files.  It is also a social network. The learners can use this to learn each other much better, sharing their learning experience easily.

Everything has two sides, there are also some challenges for teachers using these tools. The most challenge one is the training for students. Every student who will use this for learning tasks must be very clear about what they can do and how to use the right resources. Another important point is all these tools are serving for learning, so they should not be too complicated for students to use, or it will be a waste of time and energy.