Collaborative Classes, KWL charts

I am struggling with the collaborative classes. We are reading Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative and they (fairly obviously) do not like it. Sometimes I go into class with really high hopes and think they'll follow my (sometimes forced) enthusiasm, but no luck. Then I experience a mixed emotion of frustration and defeat...and it's difficult to rev my enthusiasm up again.

At the suggestion of Mr. Conrad, I tried doing a KWL chart with the collaborative classes. I wanted to show them a feature of GoogleDocs, so I used the spreadsheet and we created a KWL chart as a class. Although I intended to enhance the lesson by incorporating emerging technologies, I think everything would have worked more smoothly with individual charts (perhaps with inspiration from the class chart) and a 10 point participation grade.