Team Mode for Collaborative Learning

With remote learning in full swing in many parts of the world, teachers are searching for the best online resources to meet their students’ needs. Now more than ever, students need to feel connected to their peers and community! To add some fun to students’ online experience, Woot Math in Team Mode is an opportunity for students to come together in teams and collaborate on engaging, rich-math tasks! It’s a chance for students to work together, even when we’re all apart or social-distancing! And, it’s fun! Who doesn’t like a good, friendly competition?

While Team Mode is best suited for use in the classroom where students can talk and interact with each other easily, Team Mode can be adapted for use in remote environments. Screen-sharing capabilities will allow teachers to navigate through the Team Mode activity and display the real-time results and leaderboard while the students work through their own problems in teams using breakout rooms. In addition to Team Mode, Math Jam is a collaborative tool that works best in a remote environment!

Getting Started with Team Mode for Collaborative Learning

There are two ways to start Team Mode. Both involve finding some content either from your content or our library of free, public content. Click “teacher-led” to launch the assignment. The simple way to start Team Mode is to click the Team Mode button before you launch.

By selecting Team Mode, you are opting to run the entire assignment with students in teams. If you want to start with individual mode and switch to Team Mode part way through, you can do that too. You can switch to Team Mode at any time by clicking on the hamburger menu in the upper right corner and selecting Team Mode. This will make the rest of the activity run in Team Mode. The next step is for you to put your students into teams.

Make Groups How You Want, or How They Want

First, you decide the group size, making teams from 2 to 8 students. We’ve found teams of 3-4 are the sweet spot, but the choice is yours. You also pick how the groups are made. The groups can be made at random or picked by students. If you started Team Mode in the middle of an assignment, you can also have the software make the teams heterogeneously based on correctness of the last question. That way, you get mixed teams with some students who got the last one right and some who needed a little extra help. You can also make homogenous teams. We recommend this after a fun question asking about what hobbies they have or what kind of shows they like to watch.

“What if I don’t like the teams it made?” Great question!

The teacher has the final say over the teams, just drag a team member to a new team or put them on another team. We know that sometimes there are classroom dynamics where it is best to have some students not work with certain others or some students to work with someone in particular… the choice is yours. Below, we see a teacher moving Jeff off of team Shark, to team Cricket and then replacing him with Jefferson. Changes to teams can also be made in the middle of an assignment. You can use the list of team members on the left to drag a student to a different team.

Individual Work Time Before Collaboration

Team Mode problems start with individual work time before students collaborate. We’ve found that students have more to talk about and collaborate more evenly if they have some time to work on their own before collaborating. Each task starts with a two minute timer where students can’t submit until the timer is done, feel free to add or remove time as you see fit. We found that this solo time really pays off.

Time to Collaborate

When students finish their solo time, it’s time for team time where they can communicate with their team about how they came to their own solutions. Students have the option at this point to click on their team members’ names (see top left of image) at the top to view their scratchpad (right side of image) before they make a final decision on their answer.

Practice Math Facts While You Wait for Others to Finish

Team Mode also provides a way for students to stay engaged in math content while waiting for the rest of the class to finish using the math facts game. Students solve math fact problems and work on improving their recall and fluency. The game is just fun enough to keep (most of) them off youtube but not so fun that they rush through the real task to get to the game.

How Does The Scoring Work?

To incentivize collaboration, the team only earns a point if everyone on the team submits the correct answer. If just one student is incorrect, the team does not earn a point. Note: Everyone does not need the same answer, they just need a correct answer. Woot Math has tools that allow tasks to accept equivalent answers as correct.

This scoring method promotes collaborative learning since the success of the team depends on the success of each individual. Make sure you still hold students accountable for showing their own work. This is another great way to make sure everyone is engaging with the problem, not just copying answers. In a close race, teachers have the option to reward extra points for great work. In the event of a tie at the end, there is also a Tie Breaker option. You can find more details on the Tie Breaker and Great Work features here.

Teacher Tools

Running a Woot in Team Mode provides real-time feedback to the teacher which is great for making sure students are staying on task and moving in the right direction. All of this can be viewed by pressing the up arrow at the bottom of the teacher’s view.

As you can see below, the students’ work as well as the correctness of their answer is indicated in this view. The red border indicates the student has selected the wrong answer and green indicates the correct one. If a student has not answered, their border color remains blue.

Once the answers are submitted, you can see an aggregate view of the solutions. You also see three options at the bottom of the teacher’s screen: Student Work, Volunteers, and Bookmarks.

The volunteer tab allows you to reach out to your class and ask for volunteers. The bookmarks tab allows you to note work you’d like to save for further review.

If asking for a volunteer, all students will have this screen pop up, and they can choose whether they’d like to volunteer or not.

Since, Aladdin volunteered, his work will show up in the Volunteers tab. You may click the student’s work for a bigger view to share with the class.

The fun of Team Mode really comes from the friendly competition that ensues. Teachers share the leaderboard after each problem that shows each team’s status and ranking compared to the other teams.

If you want a fun way to get your students used to Team Mode and the functionality of the scratchpad, check out Team Mode Orientation, a warm up that we made to help get your students used to Woot Math. To preview the activity, click the link, or login to wootmath.com and search for “Team Mode Orientation” in the Shared Gallery.

We hope you enjoy Team Mode and please don’t hesitate to reach out with success stories, questions, tips or questions.

Visit our page on Formative Assessment for more on how to use this free tool in your classroom.

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