Online collaborative writing in english at the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Norte: some quantitative data on student participation in integrated secondary education.

Abstract

Online Collaborative Writing (OCW) on Google Docs has been used as an approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language in Brazil. In this article, we present some quantitative data on OCW drawn from a larger pedagogical intervention research related to the participation of 36 students in the Technical Integrated Secondary Education Program in Computing at the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Norte. Students were divided into seven groups to write collaborative posts for an informative blog over three online sessions on Google Docs. The initial findings are related to frequency, time, and interactions during those sessions. Our conclusion is that time and frequency of students on each session are not related to the amount of interactions, for groups that showed more engagement, in fact, spent less time writing, even though they had an average frequency on the sessions.