Student collaboration on shared documents: prepare for disaster ahead of time!

How much experience do you have with students collaborating on shared documents? Sometimes, it goes surprisingly well... small groups with each member working on the same digital graphic, pairs of students peer-editing essays, or partners collaborating to write a two-voice poem.

Other times... yeah, it all falls apart and goes very, very bad. As in, someone thinks that the whole thing needs to be changed to purple sparkly font bad. Or that each slide transition needs to show a cheeseburger bad. Or even random screaming Donald Trump memes bad. (Yes, sadly those have all really happened in my classroom.)

Worse yet is that collaborative projects open students up to deliberate sabotage by others, which no matter how much net etiquette and community-building you've practiced (preached!) in class, can and does happen. Thankfully in all of these cases, collaborating in Google Suite products means that as the instructor you can go back and revert to the appropriate copy of the students' work by checking out the revision history. You can also figure out which of your 28 mutant kindergartners eighth graders needs a visit from the discipline fairy.

Having attempted lots of successful collaborative projects and my fair share of failures, I've found that the shenanigans tend to happen with more visual products such as Google Slides. With a couple of projects my students are working on, my ultimate goal is to have each student produce a small number of slides that will then become part of a larger, whole-class presentation for us to use as a long-term learning resource. With several dozen students all working at the same time in one slideshow, this is NOT the time to have to deal with student sabotage. It would be nice to think that I've (you've) been able to build an entire classroom community of students who purposefully support each others' learning. Hmm...

Is there a better way to end up with the same collaborative result while ensuring that the quality of all students' work is preserved? YES! There are two suggestions I have:

(1) Students can create individual sets of slides in their own Google Drive and then copy entire slides to insert into a group presentation. Then they can get all of the layout figured out ahead of time without anyone else needing to step in with unwelcome "advice." This ensures that the original copy of the slide is preserved in the student's own Drive. However, it doesn't prevent others from manipulating the layout after it's added to the group presentation.

(2) Students can create layouts of any paper / slide size in Google Drawings. The way you manipulate the drawing tools is so similar to Slides that students have no trouble transitioning to this less-familiar tool. The great thing is that once the layout is fixed, a student can download the whole thing as a .jpg or .png image file.

This composite image can now be used in all sorts of ways, one of which is inserting the composite image onto a Google slide. Now, the whole image layout is "fixed" and cannot be accidentally or intentionally changed. Sure, it can be deleted from a slide altogether, but this is pretty rare for students to try knowing that it's super easy for a teacher to pinpoint the exact culprit from the revision history.

Regardless of what you do, it's important to be upfront with students that you can (and will) do regular integrity checks while students are working collaboratively. Reassure them that accidents happen, too, and that the "undo" button is always the easiest way for a quick fix. And take it easy on those 8th graders - they learn by baby steps.