How to use Alloprof tools to facilitate cooperative learning

At the heart of Alloprof’s website is a repository of thousands of concept sheets, which cover every subject in the Quebec Education Program at both the elementary and high school level. One way to use these sheets to facilitate cooperative learning is to create scavenger hunt–style quizzes for students to complete in small groups (ideally groups of three or four). To find the answers, the groups have to split up one or more concept sheets so that each group member is responsible for reading specific sections. They complete the quiz by taking turns writing their answers on a piece of paper.

After the first student has written down their answer, they pass their sheet of paper to the next person in their group, who reads it over. This person then adds their answer, potentially elaborating on or clarifying the one before. The process is repeated for each member of the group.

Another option is to have each group read the same concept sheet, make a collective list of the main points, and then work together to write a summary.

These activities are all about teamwork: everyone contributes to helping their group members learn and fully understand the concept in question.

The Help Zone, one of Alloprof’s most popular services, is a forum where students can ask questions about homework and review. Anyone can submit their answer to a posted question, but no answer is posted without first being validated by the Alloprof team. As an inherently collaborative tool, the Help Zone can be used as the basis for a number of cooperative learning activities. Here are some examples:

• Start by dividing the class into small groups. Each group must then come up with a question and agree on which member will ask it in the Help Zone.
• The groups can also submit explanations to unanswered Help Zone questions, which do not have to be those posted by other groups in their class. For example, they might jointly answer a question from someone in a younger grade.

The Alloprof website also contains hundreds of exercises for practising essential concepts in every subject. To implement cooperative learning, you can have your students form groups and either complete the exercises together or create similar exercises of their own for other groups to work on. Here are a couple of ideas for different grade levels:

• Elementary school: Ask your students to go to the exercise on grammatical gender and number (French only) and answer four questions (or as many as there are members in their group). Then, have them make up four exercises of the same type to give to another group.
• High school: Ask your students to go to the exercise on the perimeter and area of a triangle (French only) and answer all five questions together. Afterwards, have them come up with three exercises for another group to complete.

The popular game Book of Spells (of which a new and improved version was recently launched!) is ideal for helping students discover the joy of reading. In the game, students must answer interactive questions that test their reading comprehension in order to take care of various adorable creatures. With every right answer, they earn rewards like donuts, soap, and balloons to help level up their creature—just like in their favourite video games. You can play this fun game in class by putting your students into small groups and assigning a book to each group. Have the group members take turns reading parts of the book and then work together to answer the reading comprehension questions. 

Crash Lessons are an extremely effective review tool. Although only available in French for now, students who are studying class subjects, like history, math and science in French, can really benefit from these specialized videos. Complete with interactive questions, these roughly 30-minute online tutorials are designed to help students review key concepts, check their understanding, and consolidate their learning. One example of a cooperative learning activity you can do using Crash Lessons is to assign different sections of a video to the students in a group and have them take turns explaining their section to the other group members. In addition to being time-efficient, this strategy promotes accountability, as the students are responsible for sharing what they learn with one another. Moreover, it is well established that students tend to understand and retain information better when they go through the process of explaining it to their peers.