Digital Collaborative Writing in Primary Education: Implementation and Potentialities Samuel Gonçalves Antonieta Rocha João Paz Laboratório de Educação a Distância e Laboratório de Educação a Distância e Laboratório de Educação a Distância e eLearning eLearning eLearning Universidade Aberta Universidade Aberta Universidade Aberta Lisboa, Portugal Lisboa, Portugal Lisboa, Portugal 1600964@estudante.uab.pt mrocha@lead.uab.pt jpaz@lead.uab.pt Abstract—This research sought to assess the applicability of investigation in the field of Mobile Learning seeking to m-learning to Primary Education, since we believe that one of measure the potential of digital collaborative writing in the greatest challenges that Education currently faces is to Primary Education. Thus, the research question was the approach the technological and cultural reality of students since following: childhood. Therefore, we recognize the pedagogical potential of the use of technology in education, namely by their classroom  Can learning collaborative writing in Primary integration in Primary Education, the context of our research. Education be improved using mobile devices? In an action research setting, we developed digital collaborative writing sessions using a web-based text writing platform. The With greater specificity, we have outlined some research results showed that the use of technological resources for objectives: educational purposes presents advantages in terms of  To determine whether students' motivational index is motivation, feedback, concentration, productivity, assessment, enhanced by the use of mobile devices; reading and writing taste, digital literacy, error exposure and assignment sharing. While some technical and/or usability  To check if there is an increase in teacher productivity implementation difficulties were recognized, the positive in his action performed on the platform; indicators outweighed the negative ones and are an argument in favor of school’s mediating role of the use of these technological  To find if there is improvement of the classroom resources, rather than prohibiting them. climate by the use of mobile devices;  To check for increased student productivity; Keywords— collaborative writing, m-learning, primary  To find if there are advantages in collaborative writing education, technology. performed on mobile devices. I. INTRODUCTION II. CONTEXT There is a growing massification of digital technologies in The target audience is a class of 13 students of the 3rd year today's society, a phenomenon that is recognized by all, but of Primary Education, aged between 8 and 9 years, in a public not exploited by all. school of Portugal, namely in the Autonomous Region of the Azores (ARA). In addition to the national documents Year after year, the technological divide between school regulating the educational action of teaching, the Integrated and society is accentuated. Families in particular and society Plan for the Promotion of School Success (ProSucesso) is in general are increasingly dependent on technologies for being implemented in the ARA, whose action focuses on three carrying out the most diverse tasks. Our understanding is that axes: the school should encourage and mediate the use of digital technologies to build knowledge in the various existing 1) Axis 1: Focus on the quality of students' learning; learning environments. 2) Axis 2: Promotion of the professional development of In this regard, Tavares and Barbeiro [1] add that the teachers; development of societies is also done by technological 3) Axis 3: Mobilization of the educational community contribution, but not all citizens exploit this potential and, and social partners. therefore, it is up to the School to "mediates the process of In short, our investigative intervention focused on the transformation of information into knowledge"” [1, p. 7]. context of mobile learning (m-learning) using the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) with specific intervention Despite several initiatives and a general sensitivity of the in the curricular area of Portuguese (in the field of writing) educational community to the immanent educational potential seeking to measure advantages that may arise from the use of in technologies, schools still do not attribute due value to mobile devices. mobile technologies. That is, there is an investment in the acquisition and maintenance of computer resources such as III. MOBILE LEARNING computers, projectors, interactive whiteboards, but the use of According to Traxler [2], there has been a gradual interest smartphones is not allowed in classes, for example. in m-learning visible in the growing number of workshops, In this context and with the intention of enhancing conferences and seminars held in several countries such as immersive and meaningful learning, we carried out an England, Italy, Sweden, Taiwan, among others. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). What is meant by Mobile Learning? Without pretending Thus, opting for this methodology means that teachers to exhaust the subject, we may add that several authors, as "study students' learning by relating them to their own Certal and Carvalho; Laouris and Eteokleous; Sharples, teaching and, in this sense, it is a process that allows them to Taylor and Vavoula; and Traxler [2]–[5] have presented learn about their practices in order to improve students' several definitions about the concept of m-learning depending learning" [11, p. 132]. on the variable they emphasize most. In an attempt at systematization, Certal and Carvalho [3] present four It should be noted that the choice for this research definitions according to different perspectives on m-learning: methodology was the subject of deep reflection and originated (1) from the technological perspective, m-learning is in 3 fundamental premises: characterized by being a learning supported by mobile 1) Problem: Gaps were identified in the school path of devices; (2) in another perspective, it is considered as an the students obtained from the results of the Summative Tests extension of eLearning via mobile devices; (3) in formal of the previous school year; education, m-learning is compared to traditional forms of 2) Researcher: One of the researchers is the teacher of teaching, not limited to the classroom and finally (4) from the student and mobility perspectives, m-learning happens the class chosen as a target audience; whenever there is student learning taking advantage of mobile 3) Pragmatic nature: There was a pragmatic nature in the devices or not space dependent. intervention in order to improve teaching practice. To maintain the anonymity of the target audience and the In this research we adopted the position of Dias e Victor confidentiality of the information provided in the context of [6] on mobile learning, which in essence defines it as all this investigation, we chose to proceed with the codification learning carried out through mobile devices at any time and (Table I). place, and therefore we can talk about ubiquitous learning in the 21st century. We adopted a simple coding based on the initials of the participants in order to transcribe some of the observations, In fact, we consider that m-learning is especially directed speeches and records of the results themselves throughout the to the current generation of students whose attention in the analysis of the results. The cardinals from 1 to 13 were added classroom, according to Carvalho [7], is more difficult to to facilitate understanding for readers. keep. This generation dominates apps, games, social networks through their mobile devices and it is in this context that m- TABLE I. CODIFICATION OF ACTORS learning can intervene to foster the "involvement, Date of data Applied responsibility and creativity of students" [7, p. 2], enabling, Typology Encoding collection instruments in particular, an educational practice more focused on, and Observation close to, the student. Moreover, according to Laouris and Students A October 2019 Log Eteokleous [4], in m-learning, access and type of information differ, because the type of content tends to be more graphic, V. THE WRITING visual and animated. Communication tends to be more In relation to writing, Barbeiro and Pereira state that synchronous, spontaneous, fast, since the mobile device is "Primary Education constitutes a privileged context to always connected with Internet access and available in the proceed to knowledge integration" [12, p. 11] due to the individual's pocket. The tests, presentations, exams, and tasks teaching assigned to only one teacher. In this specific context are more flexible, instantaneous, collaborative, in short, "information and communication technologies, through the closer, and tailored, to the student. Internet, provide new means and extend the possibilities of Attewell [8] systematizes a set of advantages associated participation" [12, p. 7] allowing the desired openness. That with mobile learning: (1) it improves the skills of literacy, and is, usually, most of the work done by the students remains calculus and allows the student to recognize their skills; (2) it closed. Closed in the backpack, the notebook, the file folder... fosters learning experiences, both individual and The Internet is the door that opens it. There students can collaborative; (3) it enables the identification of areas where research, write, rewrite, format, produce, disseminate, share, the student needs help and support; (4) it contributes to digital interact and collaborate and when they do it, they are learning literacy thus fighting e-exclusion; (5) it helps to reduce the and training in, and for, the society of their time. formality of the classroom and to integrate unenthusiastic It is unavoidable to reference, albeit brief, on the Writing students; (6)it enables longer attention span times; (7) it Media at the level of writing didactics. This area has not been increases self-esteem. object of many studies or research. Aleixo [13] even considers It is undeniable that m-learning entails a set of advantages that the subject of writing media has been little problematized, that greatly favor the learning and involvement of the student since the important thing is the final production performed by in the construction of their knowledge. the students and that this view blurs the need to account for writing media. IV. METHODOLOGY However, the same author considers that we should avoid What is Action Research? It is a research methodology the idea of writing media neutrality and that several authors that was born in the first half of the 20th century whose have been corroborating the idea that "research on the founder was Kurt Lewin. Action Research presupposes a production of texts using the word processor developed in "new way of making" knowledge by the association of theory recent decades has been giving greater visibility to aspects to practice[9]. related to writing media" [13, p. 117]. Melo, Filho and Chaves [10] assume that Lewin proposed The same author presents the importance of the writing Action Research as a methodology not only for in locus notebook as an instrument for the development of learning to research, but for participating in the problem. write emerging "the clear understanding that they should constitute something like a workbench [...] that is, what VI. RESULTS students write is always available either to be reformulated or Our intervention focused on the curricular area of to be integrated into an individual writing project" [13, pp. Portuguese, in the field of writing, with the preparation of 210, 211]. This strategy has been followed within the scope of classroom scripts aimed at collaborative writing carried out on the ProSucesso project and we believe that it can be promoted the web-based Etherpad platform. Please be informed that this by the use of mobile devices as a writing, starting to be called platform was discontinued in 2020, however there are other a digital writing notebook. similar alternatives, even graphically similar, such as Riseup Textual production (Fig. 1) implies the mobilization of Pad and MeetingWords. knowledge and processes. This activity involves tasks related We chose to limit our intervention to the narrative text to three components: planning, textualization and revision type, since the students were more familiar with this type of [12], [14], and the introduction is part of the initial situation; text because it was elected to the initiation to the learning of the development includes the problem, the difficulty arising writing in the previous school year. It should be stressed that from the problem and help to overcome the difficulty: and we aimed to gauge differences and/or advantages of digital finally, the conclusion includes the final situation and may collaborative writing performed on mobile devices compared have or not a happy outcome. to traditional media. Therefore, the class was split into groups of 3 to 4 students, without changing the layout of the classroom, because each student had their own mobile device. Each element of the group was assigned specific tasks for the writing of the collaborative text. That was an essential organizational stage for the development of the activity, because the students in this age group still have not enough autonomy development to organize themselves without help. During this phase, the students expressed themselves orally evidencing some anxiety about the beginning of the activity fact we interpreted by as an indicator of motivation. Fig. 1. Sequence of narrative text [13, p. 135] "Teacher, may we begin?" (A 4); "I can start writing planning?" (A 2); "Teacher, a A8 has already begun writing; Students, even if the already know the narrative structure, may I, too? (A 5)". These and other similar expressions were need to develop an appropriate profile and congruent with the verbalized by the students during this initial period of skills necessary for writing, to become skillful writers. organization. Cassany, Luna and Sanz [15] present some premises that Contributing to this situation were two platform characterize the profile of a skillful writer. affordances that caused some distraction: color user identification and chat. Etherpad allows user identification by  Skillful writers are skillful readers and the acquisition the name and by association of a color to that user. It was of writing code results from readings performed; necessary to direct the students' attention to the work to be  They are aware of their readers, so they spend time done and not waist useful class time. thinking about what they will write and how they will The chat was the resource that challenged the most the do it to meet the expectations of the target audience; performance of the tasks. Therefore, instead of banning it, we tried to provide some feedback to students to motivate them to  They plan and structure their writing according to a focus their attention on the work to be developed using the mental construction of the text they have already chat itself. The reaction was very good! Students felt free to idealized; express themselves with emojis and interacted among  They often reread the parts of the text that they themselves and with the teacher in the chat, at the same time produce to assess whether it is in accordance with they continued their written productions. what they mean and whether it has the necessary After this initial period marked by some excitement, the consistency; students focused themselves on the task and were able to  They review the text to modify and/or improve it; produce quality writing work.  They present a recursive writing process that The collaborative writing activity, for the students, was an translates into a flexible writing that can be innovative and enriching experience because it allowed each reformulated from its starting point - planning; student to see his colleague writing, having the possibility to intervene in order to correct, add, propose, complete, among  They have resources that support to information other actions. retrieval or doubt clarification. Facial and body expressions of astonishment spread This ideal of writer is not an utopy, it is achievable. Can almost among all students. The attention to the work produced mobile devices trigger higher motivational indexes in students by peers, and, therefore, the commitment and helping each and provide moments of such an immersion that contributes other among the elements of the group were patent. to the development of writing skills? Occasionally, oral verbalizations were heard trying to help their colleagues organize their ideas and in the construction of paragraphs revealing the development of social, literacy and writing skills. "A4, you can say that the animal was caught in teacher to act more timely, allowing faster feedback to the a trap" (A12); "A10, the lion could be called Crystal" (A8). student. However, this feature was not always well used by the This speed in feedback entails some advantages in learning students, as there were situations in which colleagues writing, because it allows closer monitoring of the student, it inadvertently deleted the written productions of others. is process and not product focused, avoids the visualization of "Teacher, I wrote the introduction and A13 erased everything" the error by the student, corrects just in time and assists in the (A12); "Who's erasing?" (A 9); "People are messing with what correct development of writing skills avoiding the I've done" (A 6); "Now I have to do it again" (A8); "A13 did accumulation of faults that can lead to enduring errors and it" (A12); "It was not me, teacher" (A13). demotivation for writing. Although these transcripts seem somewhat dramatic, they To the timely feedback we must add the capability of are easily corrected by the user himself, undoing their latest reaching everyone. That is, as the follow-up by the teacher is actions. done on the mobile device, it is possible to have in the Internet browser several tabs corresponding to the work of all groups / Motivation, perhaps, is the variable that was most students. Thus, viewing and intervening in the written evidenced. The classes where mobile devices would be used productions of the students is a click away. were preceded by great enthusiasm by students who showed great anxiety until they were authorized to use these resources. Since this is not the focus of this study, we just remark that this would be an area worth exploring, as it enables the In the time frames that mediated the classes where those production of collaborative interclass, inter-schools, with mobile devices would be used, students often produced family work, i.e., an wider collaboration framework, not vocalizations requesting their use: "are we going to do restricted to the classroom. Etherpad today?" (A8); "shall we finish the text now?" (A3); and some dialogues that fueled this hope: The graphic output we get from the action of students in groups and teacher is another advantage to stress. It is always - "Teacher, what are we going to do today?" (A2) difficult to measure, in the work of groups, which is the - "Why do you ask that?" (Teacher) contribution of each element for the final product and this platform facilitates this appraisal, because it associates each - "We could do a little Etherpad…"(A 2) color with its respective user (students and teacher). For It should be noted that this interest was not short-lived as example, in the text "The unicorn and the mysterious eagle" the students, on their own initiative, created private pads to (Fig. 3), we can see that the 3 elements of the group write their texts. As this is a personal initiative of a few contributed homogeneously to the final product (the being the students, we chose not to include them as a research data in 4th contributor). this investigation, but we think it is worth mentioning. The time involved in textual production on the online platform was roughly the same commonly used in traditional writing media and the possibility of future publication of the works was also advantageous because it was carried out on a digital platform, since the final production was already digital. The goal of 75 words (Fig. 2) for textual production in the 3rd year was met and even exceeded, with an average of 135 words. It should be noted that this number of words is also above that recommended for the subsequent school year – 4th year (90 words). 180 164 160 140 137 124 120 113 100 80 75 75 75 75 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 Fig. 2. Number of words from collaborative textual production The follow-up by the teacher was also done on the Fig. 3. Graphic output of collaborative text on Etherpad platform, because, as already mentioned, it is possible, in real time, to monitor the progress of the students and watch the From the visualization of the text (Fig. 3) it is possible to production of their texts, at the time they occur, enabling the perceive more clearly the advantages of digital collaborative writing compared to the writing performed in traditional media. It should be noted that collaborative writing on Another situation that may compromise the task is that traditional media is more passive for students as their students do not have mobile devices. It is recommended that contributions are usually oral and only one student writes. In the teacher provide some devices to address this possible digital collaborative writing there is a greater involvement of situation. all students at all stages contributing to meaningful and immersive learning centered on the process and not on the The level of digital literacy of both students and teachers product. can facilitate or hinder the writing process. Some of the common doubts: demarcation of paragraphs, typing of We should also stress that our goal, in addition to the accents, punctuation marks and general formatting of the text. assessment of the advantages of digital writing, is to enhance and encourage the use of mobile devices in the teaching- As a disadvantage in collaborative writing, it is worth learning process from a perspective of complementarity and mentioning that we have to deal with some delays as each never the replacement of existing writing media. student contributes to the text in each stage. For example, one cannot write the conclusion without having completed the From the stages of writing production, it was found that development stage. Still in this type of writing, there was a the review stage gains an important emphasis if practiced in a more noticeable use of the Chat, and the choice of the online digital platform, because the correction and rewriting do not platform for writing should ensure it is as minimalist as entail some of the constraints of traditional media such as possible. erasing and starting again, copying again all production, common strikethroughs and teacher corrections. In digital VII. CONCLUSIONS media, it is possible to format, correct, add, remove, and even Recalling the starting question, " • Can learning move, parts of the text and rearrange it without wasting time, collaborative writing in Primary Education be improved using duplication of work and constraints for students. mobile devices?", we answer it with a categorical "Yes". The Synchronous monitoring of writing tasks developed in the use of mobile devices can contribute to the improvement of classroom by the parents and/or other people becomes collaborative writing in childhood. However, it is not enough possible on the Etherpad platform. In the days leading up to to deliver or ask students to use mobile devices without any the class sessions, the parents were informed of this criteria and expect beneficial results. It is necessary to affordance, but despite this information, there were no users properly plan the activities involving mobile devices with beyond the students and teacher. However, this possibility is well-designed objectives for the skills to be developed. That's assumed to be a great advantage over the traditional work that why we structured our intervention in order to get relevant is registered and kept closed in school notebooks, as they tend results. to remain throughout the school year in school. However, We proposed a set of objectives for this research for which during the following days, the students brought oral accounts we present some answers: that they had shown their parents their work and in particular the conversations held in the chat.  To determine whether students' motivational index is enhanced by the use of mobile devices; Recalling some of the advantages of m-learning presented by Attewell [8] such as: literacy development and calculus; This objective was easily attainable. We would even say individual and collaborative learning; identification of student that it is enough to present the task to be performed using difficulties; increased self-esteem; longer attention periods mobile devices, that motivation arises instantly. The and the profile of a skillful writer, as Cassany, Luna and Sanz motivation index was measurable, throughout the [15] refer that they plan, structure, reformulate and review the investigation, by the verbalizations of the students requesting writing according to their mental construction to correspond the use of mobile devices. The Etherpad writing platform has to a target audience, we believe that these writing sessions on produced high motivational indexes contributing to the Etherpad platform contemplate all the advantages immersive, meaningful and contextualized learning. We proposed by Attewell [8] and contribute to the development would point out that this interest was not short-lived as of the profile of a skillful writer presented by Casany, Luna students, on their own initiative, created pads to write their and Sanz [15]. texts. Due to these assumptions, collaborative writing on an  To check if there is an increase in productivity by the online platform, in classroom context, when well planned, teacher in his action performed on the platform; contributes to the development of the taste for reading and The absence of a spelling and grammar checker on the writing, promotes digital literacy, allows writing and rewriting Etherpad platform requires that these actions must be without constraints, favors the attention focus in the task, performed by the teacher. Since the class was subdivided into promotes a good classroom climate, facilitates the teacher's groups, there was an effective monitoring by the teacher in follow-up, contributes to less error exposure, facilitates the providing the necessary feedback to the groups at the distance publication or presentation of the works and presents an of a click. We considered that there was an increase in teacher openness trait. This openness can be exercised to alter texts, productivity by the monitoring provided on the platform review, read them, publish and share them. favoring interactivity between peers and textual correction. On the other hand, the diversity of equipment (laptops,  To find if there is improvement of the classroom smartphones, and tablets), with different screen sizes, may be climate by the use of mobile devices; a disadvantage in the case of students who are not familiar with the equipment to be used. However, if the student is After the initial period of getting used to the mobile familiar with the equipment, then should not be understood as devices, we found that the tasks favored a greater focus of a disadvantage. students, thus contributing to a good classroom climate.  To check for increased student productivity; [8] J. Attewell, Mobile technologies and learning: a technology update and m-learning project summary. London: Learning and Skills In the class sessions we found that students exceeded the Development Agency, 2005. 75-word goal for the 3rd year. However, compared to the [9] P. Ferreira, "The Use of The Methodology of Research-Action in Social records in traditional media, we found that there is a similarity Intervention: a theoretical reflection," Rev. Interv. Soc., vol. 32, no. 32, pp. 215–236, 2008. between these different writing media. [10] A. S. E. de Melo, O. N. M. Filho, and H. V. Chaves, "Lewin e a  To find if there are advantages in collaborative writing pesquisa-ação: genesis, application and purpose," Fractal Rev. Psicol., performed on mobile devices. vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 153–159, 2016. [11] J. R. Santos, Action research and the development of educational We have seen some advantages in composition writing practices and educational leadership conducive to effectiveness in performed on mobile devices, such as: collaborative writing schools. Lisbon: Open University of Portugal, 2017. allowed at a higher level (contributing and seeing [12] L. F. Barbeiro and L. Á. Pereira, O Ensino da Escrita: a dimensão contributions from colleagues simultaneously); timely follow- textual, 1st Edition. Lisbon: Ministry of Education - General Directorate of Innovation and Curriculum Development, 2007. up, by the teacher, to the student, enabling faster feedback; [13] M. da C. F. A. Aleixo, "The Writing notebooks as mediators of the closer monitoring of the student; process-centric evaluation; production of texts by students of the 1st CEB," Doctoral Thesis, avoid the student's display of the error; easier evaluation by University of Aveiro, 2010. visualizing the graphic output of the students' written [14] C. Reis et al., "Portuguese Basic Education Programs." Ministry of productions (group and individual); increased standing of the Education - General Directorate of Innovation and Curriculum review stage and facilitation of future publication of the work, Development, Lisbon, 2009. concluding, therefore, that digital writing books are more [15] D. Cassany, M. Luna, and G. Sanz, Enseñar lengua. Barcelona: Graó, versatile. 1994. A. Other conclusions In addition to the objectives initially presented we have ascertained, during the sessions, other situations worth mentioning.  The time involved in textual production on the online platform was roughly the same commonly used in traditional writing media.  In addition to the feedback, we should keep in mind the idea of reaching everyone. 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