A teacher wants to assign a group project where students work collaboratively…

Concept — Educational software is chosen by matching what a task requires to the function a tool is actually built to perform. Four functional families cover the tools named in this list:

• Collaborative authoring — many people edit one shared document at the same time; the tool keeps version history and lets a comment be anchored to a selected passage and replied to.

• Project or task management — the work is split into cards or tasks that move through stages such as To-do, Doing and Done, so how far the group has got is visible to everyone.

• Assessment — a learner answers individually and the tool records a score against a fixed answer key.

• Academic-integrity checking — an already-submitted file is compared against a database of publications, web pages and earlier student papers to produce a similarity report.

Application — The stem sets three requirements: students work together online, their progress is tracked, and they comment on one another's work. Working together online and commenting on each other's work is the definition of collaborative authoring; tracking progress is the definition of project or task management. The task therefore needs one tool from each of those two families. It needs nothing from the assessment or academic-integrity families, because both of those act on a finished individual submission and neither provides a shared workspace.

The four tools listed in the stem

Cross-check — Google Docs on its own would cover the writing and the commenting but would leave progress tracking informal; Trello on its own would show progress but gives the group nowhere to co-write the project. Used together they meet all three requirements with no overlap, while Quizzes and Turnitin add nothing the stem asks for.

Answer — Google Docs together with Trello — that is, B and D from the list given in the stem.