[Tool Sharing] Collaborative learning with tricider

Have you been frustrated with being unable to motivate your students to actively participate in your class, or to encourage them to voluntarily respond to your questions? I don't know about you, but this is a common phenomenon that occurs in Asian context, as students are afraid to stand out in front of their peers and also fear the possibility of making a fool of themselves if they answer incorrectly. 

If you have the same concerns, look no further! Tricider is an excellent and highly interactive tool that encourages students to use the target language purposefully and collaboratively. 

BASIC FUNCTIONS OF TRICIDER 

Tricider is an online tool that teachers can use to propose questions for students to think and discuss about. Any types of questions works, such as simple gist questions, like "What do you do to gain confidence?" to get students thinking, or deeper, in-depth thinking questions, "Should euthanasia be legal?" to boost heated discussion.  As the teacher publishes the question, she can share the link with the students via social network (Facebook, Twitter...etc) or by emailing the students the link. This function makes it easily accessible and manageable for students to partake the activity, and students may also collaborate with their peers and produce language outside of the classroom. 

GOING INTO DETAIL WITH THE  FUNCTIONS OF TRICIDER

Tricider allows students to contribute to the discussion by adding an idea, voting, and elaborating on an idea about what they agree or disagree with it. As students are allowed to add any ideas they have in mind, they can freely express themselves on the site without feeling pressured or anxious. 

The collaborative component of this tool is the 'Add argument' function. Instead of each student typing whatever thoughts they have, if they see an idea posted that they had similar thoughts or disagree with, they can expand on the idea. In the end, different ideas would have arguments, explanation, or examples from different perspectives, making it more well rounded. This also encourages students to think critically.  As students place their votes on the ideas they like or agree with, the teacher may use the 'Contest' function to reward students with most highly agreed idea (the reward can be customised and decided by the teacher), or to throw in some competition to activate more output.


Lastly, you are given the option of publishing the question or not. This may prevent the risk of having stranger lurking about the platform and disrupting the educational, stress-free environment (although chances are low), but this makes students and parents feel safer and relieved to know that this can be avoided. 

HOW TO APPLY TRICIDER TO THE CLASSROOM 

The functions of tricider is very adaptable to the classroom; there are various ways to use it to execute the lesson. It can be used as pre-task, like generating thoughts with gist questions, during-task, such as comprehension question to check students' understanding of the content, and post-task such as discussion questions for students to explore their learning and thoughts on the text, or critical thinking questions for students to interpret the text. Teachers may also utilise this tool as a pre-writing task. With many ideas and arguments pitched in the platform, students may gain insight from different angles and use it to formulate the content of their writing assignment.  

If you wish to put an end to dealing with student passivity, don't hesitate to try out this tool to encourage more participation from the students and more usage of the target language!