The group has a text with blank spaces and each student has a different set of words to fill in the spaces. They must search and decide among each other which is the suitable word for each space.

In a flipped classroom, the students had to work on the house compartments and each compartment’s furniture. They should make a video to present the class. They made the plan of their work in class, each member of the group made researches regarding the furniture related to one or two  compartments, they shared the information with the other members of the group, they met outside the class to actually make the video in one of their homes and finally they made the presentation to the class, each member of the group describing his compartment.

- Do they work together? They had to. Like a puzzle,  each member of the group had individual tasks that would come together and form the group work.

- Do they have shared responsibility? Who does what and how they will present the results? Each group member was allowed to volunteer to do a certain part of the work.

- Do they make substantive decisions? They had to decide the key points of their workplan, who did what and how they would do it in order to achieve the best result possible. 

- Was their work interdependent? Through the whole process they had to discuss and negotiate what would each student’s role be, which task one needed to carry out to would be done be and how they would gather all contributions in order to .  Each student’s contribution is needed to complete the final group work. 

Like she says, working in a collaborative model demands a lot of time from the teachers, both before classes, planning and organizing and after, assessing the work that was done, the effectiveness of the planning, reformulating the planning, analyzing the students response to what was done… It is also true that many teachers are not available to work that way. They are afraid of letting someone else enter “their space” and of being judged by that other person. I would be delighted to have someone sharing the classroom space with me, the space could be organized in a different way and we could implement different strategies according to the students needs.

4.3 A secondary teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration
The fact that digital technologies can bring specific benefits to facilitate the process of teacher collaboration is undeniable. Reyhan describes the importance of collaborating with teachers and experts beyond your school to create new ideas and exchange best practices, and in fact that is a fantastic way of putting you close to colleague teachers around the world. Never had technology been so friendly to education and the teaching and learning process. The problem is young people were already born in that era, whereas most of the teachers are still learning their way around them. Students learn computer language just like that, even almost by intuition, and many teachers have a hard time understanding the basics. So it’s not difficult to understand that many teachers are still reluctant to work with digital technologies, they don’t have the required skills to take advantage of them.  I had never heard of epals but I am curious to learn about it. I have worked with eTwinning some years ago. Thanks to eTwinning I met a Danish colleague and we have been collaborating regularly every year since the last six years. That and a Comenius project are my experiences in collaborative work.

4.4 The benefits and challenges of teacher collaboration 
What Deirdre had to say is so true! She empathized the benefits but she also highlighted the challenges teachers have to face regarding teacher collaboration. Nowadays there is a whole world out of our classroom “stalking” our students and we just can’t you pretend it has nothing to do with us. However I take two of the challenges she points out, the need of a supportive school culture and the fact that schools have to build in time for teacher collaboration in teachers’ schedules. If these two conditions are met, we’ll be more than half way to putting teachers working in a collaborative way. 

I do agree we sometimes don’t move beyond sending and displaying and we need to move beyond to where we are processing, analysing and sharing, but then, that is what this MOOC is for, right?