Stormboard: Riding out the storms of collaborative learning

A common doubt that we, language teachers, often have is whether our lessons allow enough production time for our students to produce meaningful output. For novice teachers like me, it's easy to fall into the trap of stuffing down exercises or "testing" previous knowledge. Collaborative learning seems like the doable way-out since it shifts the focus onto the learners and promotes features of scaffolding, but as the infamous saying goes, it is easier said than done. In this post, I'll be sharing about Stormboard, originally designed for business and industry team organisation, but will do wonders in constructing a truly collaborative learning experience in the ELT classroom.

Stormboard, a clever blend of the words "brainstorm" and "whiteboard", is basically a virtual whiteboard where multiple users can write ideas on something like Post-it notes (Sticky) about a certain topic of question,  forming a cloud of ideas (Storm) which can be added and voted on. Using Stormboard is as simple as this three-step process:

With its simple, straightforward and fresh layout, Stormboard is extremely easy to set up. Sign up with your Google or Facebook account, and you're off to go.  For features like exporting your Storms into PDF, you'd need to upgrade to a paid account, but if you're a student or educator, click here to experience Stormboard completely free of charge. 

Creating a Storm is fairly self-explanatory since there's not much on the screen to confuse users. The interesting part is where you get to use and adjust the Sticky notes. Simply double-click anywhere on the canvas and a note will appear where you can post your ideas. Personalising the notes is rather fun because you can embed pictures, videos, sketch/ handwritten text, lock the notes, change tag color, and set as Title font face. 

To me, for collaboration, the comment and chat functions are state-of-the-art. For each sticky note on the Storm, users can add comments to it and state their preference by casting votes. Effective for real time discussion and definitely eases the communication flow because of the immediate feedback! It might become quite an eye-strain to read through comments of each post when there are lots of stickies on the board, ending up with having ideas neglected. But, rounding up the discussion or getting other members' attention can easily be done on the chat bar. In language learning, this synchronous interaction facilitates students' output, awareness of language, purposeful communication and fosters the collaboration. 

Thanks to the function of making Stacks on Stormboard, a simple eliciting activity where students brainstorm possible pros and cons of a debate motion can be done in a more pleasurable and student-centered way. Whether this sets a framework or insight-collecting before students perform an oral debate, or whether the debate is held online via this tool, students have plenty of chances to produce the L2. They can back their ideas or counteract opposing views with videos or relevant links, meaning that there will be purposeful reading. Teachers can discuss afterwards as a class dialog by going through the Report to check what every group member has contributed, or convert frequently mentioned words into a Wordle (there is a function for this!) leading to a possible writing task. 

Creating outlines for Collaborative Writing

Using Stormboard together with MoPad is like putting icing on the cake. I tried this one out with my classmates during my ICT class and it was challenging yet good fun (credits to Andy Davidson for setting up the activity). You can have the students work together to write an essay, and use Stormboard as a brainstorming tool to come up with outline the key content of each paragraph. Later on, they can construct their essay on MoPad which all group members have access to via a shared link. Because communication is real time (students see words written by others appear on the screen as they are being typed), the opportunity to discuss paragraph organisation, as well as scaffold (peer correct) on writing mechanics, grammar, diction, and coherence is massive. 

As a recap, Stormboard is great for getting students to better produce the L2 through formulating their ideas in collaborative written dialogs, comment on different views, and receive feedback on them. I don't see any major limitations to this tool apart from how much time it will take to conduct such activities during class hours. Perhaps a whole-class activity making use of the voting function would be a nice pre-activity to trigger active knowledge and wouldn't take up too much time. If you're interested in seeing the Storms I've created for this post, do pay a quick visit by signing up to Stormboard and entering these details:

Give Stormboard a go and you'll be hooked on it for sure!