Technology Integration
Fostering Collaboration in Student Projects
In the article Curriculum-Based Telecollaboration, Judi Harris offers 18 major ?activity structures? that teachers can use to help them design classroom projects. Many teachers can probably agree with me that designing projects is one of the most challenging tasks of teaching. To alleviate this challenge, Harris points out that there are many tools and projects available on the Web that teachers can employ, further suggesting the best uses of activity structures for those projects. Harris identified three major categories of student action along with several activities in each category.
Interpersonal Exchange: Keypals, global classrooms, electronic appearances, telementoring, question-and-answer activities, and impersonations
- Information and Analysis: Information exchanges, database creation, electronic publishing, telefieldtrips, and pooled data analysis
- Problem Solving: Information searches, peer feedback activities, parallel problem solving, sequential creations, telepresent solving, and simulations
As Harris points out, collaborative learning can have a tremendous effect on students? engagement of student projects. The activity structures presented above help students to use the Internet to accomplish curriculum-related learning goals. When projects are created to be forward-thinking and multidisciplinary, students will actively focus more of their attention on the problem, placing more effort into solving it. Having learned many useful activity structures, I plan to use at least of them as tools to enhance the projects that I assign to my students.
I am always thinking of ways to make student projects more exciting, more engaging, and more meaningful to my students. Even my most well thought out student assignments and projects still seem like they are missing depth. Part of this may be due to me not being resourceful and using the Internet for collaborative learning tools. I am guilty of wanting to do things myself, to create projects from scratch, to design my own grading rubrics. The problem with this that I?ve found is that most of my time is spent trying to reinvent the wheel instead of modifying what already exists so that projects are more thought out. The major lesson that I have learned in ECI 511 is to use the Web ? the primary source for a wealth of educational resources and tools! Some of the projects that I assign have to be completed in such small amounts of time. This is often due to the amount of objectives that have to be taught in a curriculum. I can eliminate a lot of this with more focused planning and utilizing the resources that are readily available to me via the Web.
A few of the activities that I plan to use in my Accounting and Business & Electronic Communications classes are the interpersonal exchanges. Blackboard has a discussion board feature that will allow my students to share ideas, discuss relevant topics, and to learn from each other.
Natasha Deese
Posted at 06:28PM Jun 20, 2006 by nvivey in General | Comments[0]