How can you manage collaboration in a plugged classroom?
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On a purely subjective basis, I will roam the room and see who is helping whom. I saw a lot of students helping students during the html phase, and I plan to encourage it by making it part of my grade during the unit. I wonât be distinguishing helpers and helpees, but I will be looking for the students working in their own bubbles and ignoring the rest of the class.
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Many lessons require students to work together. Some activities require students to take on specific roles or tasks. Some activities require âpartner or pair programmingâ. All of these approaches enhance and encourage collaboration and they are techniques that I have used in with Units 1-3. I am current in Unit 3 with my students.
That said, when students present their projects they authentically interact with each other. When we discuss ideas, as a class, we all become a collaboration community centered on the topic at handâŚ
After reading the article ( http://www.edutopia.org/blog/deeper-learning-collaboration-key-rebecca-alber ) ⌠I was reminded that as a class for the first week, all students worked in small groups to develop group ânormsâ. Each group then shared their groups list with the others and as a class some of the norms from each list were selected to create a class list of group norms. We then ranked them in importance.
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I walk around while they are working on projects and as students have questions, I will call over students who have figured that out already to help the struggling student. Also, sharing work with the group through gallery walks helps foster collegiality as students leave post-it notes with comments, questions, and applause on each otherâs work.
I manage collaboration in a plugged classroom by having students assign and rotate roles. This allows each student to have an equal opportunity in learning and practicing their skills.
In using primarily project-based teaching, collaboration is a must and paired-shared is an absolute. I quickly saw the early attempts students did in trying to create their own groups, so I frequently mix things up on a regular basis and they have now gotten used to it. They know if they want to get the points and learn well, collaboration and communication with everyone is key in my classroom, as one of my favorites is âWelcome to the Real Worldâ.
Implementing collaboration in the lessons is a real challenge for me. I am very old school and like to have control of my class. For me, the best implementation of collaborative learning is pairing the strongest students with the weaker students. This works especially well as the strongest students are usually finished with their programs well before the rest of the class, and the weakest are struggling with the more complex concepts. Both students benefit. Of course care must be taken in that the pairs are somewhat compatible.
I have been searching for big projects to give to my Computer Programming I class that would lend itself to group work, but have yet to find a really good meaningful project.
I have not taught this course yet, but in working through the content I see a lot of opportunities for students to collaborateâwith elbow partners, small groups, and then as a large group.
I wasnât a big fan of journaling, a few of the classes at school do it and kids get tired of it. But after the first ecs training I felt it really helped me as a learner. I donât do it everyday but having the kids share their ideas with each other and then class gives everyone a voice.
I also have group projects, for example today I had kids present internet safety tips to the class. they worked in groups of three and everyone had to research and present. I think the kids like to hear from other kids. and it gave everyone a chance to talk.
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Teaching at a primarily project-based teaching academy. One of our tenets is collaboration to help students be ready for the workplace skills. Therefore I am always encouraging collaboration. When working together only one person is allowed to touch the mouse or keyboard. The other students may guide or talk student through a problem or programming question but they cannot take over the physical mouse or keyboard of the student they are helping.
One the best strategies that I use in the classroom for collaboration is the group picker. I use it so that students will know that they are to collaborate with all of their peers and not just their friends. I roam the classroom to listen for conversations. I assign roles to each person in the group to be sure that everyone is a participant to the group setting. I award extra points to the students who reach out to help others without me asking them to.
Students are allowed to collaborate to complete learning activities, and to teach each other how to use software.
I like your idea of associating gallery walk with post-it notes, especially for applause.
Recombining new groups has become a way to emphasize collaboration and maximize productivity. Except for ensuring that each group had at least one female (My class only has 30% females.), I let students form the groups themselves at the beginning. It quickly became obvious that some groups were not as able to meet the goals of the assignment as others. Some were too distracted by the outside interests they shared, or they were too similar in skill level. Later, I used some of the strategies I picked up from the summer PD to randomly form groups. Now that we all know each other, I formed the last round of groups by making sure that struggling students were distributed amongst all the groups to make sure they would have the support they need.
I like your approach and use this my self. I have done this for years, students are encouraged to help each other with problems, but are not allowed to touch any computer except their own.
On a daily basis I try to model and encourage students to help each other in areas they have mastered. I also do gallery walks on a regular basis so they get a chance to collaborate and get ideas from each other.
I encourage students to help one another in order to figure things out and not rely solely on me for help. Some students are very advanced and can be used as helpers in the class.
In some cases students work on his/her own computer, but, share their thoughts/knowledge with their neighbors. In other cases, students team up and create one project (letâs say a website) with another using only one computer. Whatever makes the student feel more comfortable is what I am trying to experiment with. I am trying to have the students feel successful at the end of the project in whatever way suites him/her best.
I like to use pair programming to help students gain skill when beginning to program. Also, at all times I encourage students to discuss and collaborate on creating an algorithm to solve a given problem.
I am thankful that my students have laptops rather than a traditional computer lab. Students are put in groups of four, each with a laptop, and are always asked to talk with their team before coming to me with a question. They easily work together to solve problems and help each other out.