Ten Collaborative Project Ideas

One of my favorite ways to leverage technology for learning is to engage in collaborative projects with other classes. You can connect to other classes in your school, in your country, and around the world. Students can gain new perspectives, learn about other regions, engage with an authentic audience, and have the opportunity to practice digital citizenship.

Read on for my ten favorite collaborative project ideas. At the end, I'll share my tech recommendations and tips for finding partners.

1. Literature connections

My years joining The Global Read Aloud have taught me the power of a shared piece of literature. Although the official project has seen its final year, classes can still make connections over literature.

Update: The Global Read Aloud will be back next year.

Select a book you would like to read along with another class and determine how you would like your students to connect. One of my favorite ways is to have students share their reactions using my Emoji Reader's Response menu. 

2. The Community Connection

One of my absolute favorite projects I have participated in was The Community Connection. Unfortunately, this is another project whose organizer no longer carries on the project. Again, the basic idea is solid and the project can begin again with any group of dedicated teachers. For this project students focus on introducing their community as either urban, suburban, or rural. They work as a class to create posts that give the viewers a peek into their community. The more classes that join, the richer the learning. 

A spinoff idea I have used before is to give clues about your community and leave it up to your partners to guess what type of community you live in. 

Other community information to share during collaborative projects can include information on the wild animals and native plants in your area, famous local dishes or restaurants, popular sports and games students enjoy, and information about popular local celebrations.

3. Gingerbread STEM

This project gives a unique STEM twist to the idea of sharing about your community. Each year classes around the world build models of their community out of gingerbread (or, more often, cardboard and graham crackers). They then share their creations via a live video call. Another option is to record videos showing off each piece of the project. Visit their official website here.

4. Weather Pals

Connect with a class in a different region than your own or connect with a mixture of classes near and far. Either collect weather measurements or online weather data and post it for all groups to view. Then you can compare and contrast your weather. I like to extend the project by having students respond to online discussion questions: 

1. Where do you check the forecast? 
2. How does the weather impact the activities you do and the choices you make? 
3. What questions or comments do you have about our weather data?

5. Identity projects

When connecting with other classes online you can always have students share basic information about themselves. Have them share what they are good at, what makes them happy, favorite foods and activities, or have them respond to more specific prompts (e.g., how they celebrate their birthday). This will give their partners a sense their identify. 

To take this idea further have your students engage in creating an identity projects using words, symbols, and images. Here's a lesson plan from Teaching Tolerance and a Pinterest board of sample projects I've collected. If possible, it can be very powerful to have students include information about their heritage within their identity project.

6. Food blogging

For this fun idea students work together to build a food blog. They each pick a recipe to post. Ideally, students bring in their recipe for everyone to try (very small, taste test portions are best). Then their classmates write comments under the recipe. If your students are all virtual this year or are not eating in school, they can still post their recipes and students can each pick a recipe to make at home and try.

Partner classes can also join and you can make each others' recipes and comment on the posts.

7. Environmental projects

For this collaborative project students focus on the natural environment in their local area and the rules their community follows to keep the earth healthy and habitable. Students can research town recycling rules and other environmental regulations in the local area (e.g., plastic bans, littering fines, etc.). I highly recommend developing a survey as a class to send out to families and other community members to get a sense of the practices they engage in. 

The class shares the information they have learned and can compare the rules in different communities. They can engage in discussions with their partner classes to ask questions and make comments. To take it a step further students can learn about global issues and propose solutions to the world's biggest environmental problems.

8. Blogging

Many of the projects mentioned above can be blogging projects, but you don't need a special theme in order to use blogs to collaborate with other classes. Students can post about anything they have learned in school. They will love having an authentic audience for their writing, "teaching" other students information they learned in class, and getting likes and comments on their work.

One of my favorite blogs I've run throughout the years was a book blog that I called Read a Rainbow of Books. This focused on getting students excited about reading books across a "rainbow" of genres, setting up reading challenges, and book recommendations. Students often used the comments section on my posts, but eventually began to make the posts themselves.

9. Mystery Skype

Mystery Skype is a geography game students play to guess the location of the other class. You don't have to use Skype and can use any mutually agreed upon video conferencing software. There are a lot of posts online to learn how to prepare for and play Mystery Skype. Here's an article on ISTE written by Pernille Ripp to check out.

10. Mystery Number

Mystery Number is a number line guessing game to play with another class. Each group picks a secret number that the other group has to guess. Students take turns asking yes or no questions to try to guess the number (e.g., is your number less than 8?). Students should wait to make a single number guess until the end of the game. Read more here.

Final Considerations

Tech Recommendations

Blogging software is a natural fit for many of these projects. If you are a Seesaw user it is easy to turn on the blog feature and use it to connect to other classes. Learn how here. Blogger is also nice since it is a Google tool and many schools already have student Google accounts. 

Word processing software like Google Docs can also be used for written work since students can share files and collaborate on documents with this software. Just make sure that the group you are partnering with can easily work with the file type you will be using.

Use Google Meets, Skype, and Zoom for video conferencing calls. 

Flipgrid offers an easy solution for sharing brief videos and works no matter what devices or programs your district has invested in.

Tips for Finding Partners

The biggest place these days to find classes to connect with is on Facebook groups. Join the Connected Classrooms Facebook group or one of the groups for the software you would like to use. For example, Seesaw Teachers and Flipgrid Educators are active groups. 

GridPals is built right into Flipgrid. Use it to reach other classrooms using that software.

Although the Global Read Aloud is over, teachers looking for connections surrounding literature still post weekly. You might even get bites for non-literature based connections using this group of 21.8K members.

You can use Twitter hashtags for specific projects. Try #MysterySkype and #MysteryNumber.

For a more structured experience try out Empatico. Many of their projects are similar to the ones I've recommended here.