Week #4 in CEDO525

It’s a Wild Ride

This week we were asked to view an interdisciplinary unit titled: It’s a Wild Ride available at http://educate.intel.com/en/WildRide.  The unit is very similar to one I do with my freshmen except that the scope is much larger in the Intel lesson.  I really like the cross disciplinary aspects of the project that get students to use language and researching skills when they are studying roller coasters and the laws of motion.  I also thought that the introduction of the unit by having the teachers do a skit was brilliant.  What a great way to get the students excited to study a topic.  Also, the inclusion of a trip to an amusement park is a great end of the year cap to their studies in middle school.  The project looks like a lot of fun.

In my own classroom we study forces and energy in much the same way, but my students do not build a hypothetical roller coaster, they build a marble coaster that uses paper shapes on a plastic scaffold that students can decorate and label much easier than some of the kinex and pipe insulation that are present in the pictures of the lesson.  The lesson also only takes about 18 class days from start to finish instead of the 30 outlined by the project.  There are advantages to each, but the scope and scale of the Intel project puts it a step above my classroom unit.

 

An example of one of my student's paper roller coaster and force diagrams

TED Talk: institutions vs. Collaboration

This week we watched a TED talk by Clay Shirky about the difference between collaboration and institutions when it comes to sharing and organizing data.  Mr. Shirky detailed the issues with forming professional groups to solve problems, gather information or create new technology.  He claims that through centralization we loose a lot of contributions from the fringe.  Only by making your system truly collaborative can you gain all of the contributions from every member of a group so that you do not loose a good idea.  I agree that ideas can come from anywhere, but there is a certain thing that institutions do that purely collaborative groups can not and that is to compensate their workers. Purely collaborative models such as flicker, wikipedia and del.ico.us do create vast amounts of information that is catalogued very quickly, the work that is done by the members of these sites is not for profit and as such is amateur at best and self destructive at worst.  The policing of these sites are left up to the users and depends upon people valuing their digital personas in order to keep people in line.  In contrast an institution has multiple “carrots and sticks” to keep their employees or members in line and working toward the common goal.  Since we are a society that requires money to live I feel it is disingenuous to not mention this in a talk about institutions vs. collaborative groups.

Cooperative Learning

In chapter 7 of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works the authors have many different suggestions when it comes to forming groups and giving them collaborative tasks to accomplish.  The authors outline that groups should be of mixed ability, small in size and be frequently used.  All of these suggestions are spot on when it comes to implementing cooperative learning in a classroom.  If groups are put together in a way that groups all the high achieving students together and all of the low achieving groups together then of course the high achievers will get a good grade and the low achievers will get a poor one.  If groups are too large (more than 4 students in my opinion) then some students will coast on the contributions of their classmates.  If groups are done infrequently then you will have to spend a large amount of class time acquainting students with their roles and responsibilities inside of a group.  The up side to all of this is that when done properly collaborative learning can foster a sense of community and decentralize the learning so that students can help each other learn and achieve.

Reinforcing Effort

In chapter 8 of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works the authors have outlined numerous ways that technology can be used to reinforce student effort.  Aside from the obvious emails home and awards certificates produced in Mircosoft Word the text cites several unique ideas about how to motivate students. I really enjoyed the use of spread sheets for students to chart and evaluate their progress in a task.  This idea combines the students’ need to have constant feedback on their performance with a visual reminder about how they are doing.  The system is self-directed so that teachers do not have to spend extra time daily evaluating students and students themselves will enjoy seeing their “score” rise daily as they labor on a project or unit. I like how much the system parallels a “Gamer Score” that students can compare with each other and use as a motivation to do more in class.  I’m going to evaluate how to implement this in my AP class to further push my students in some electronic assignments that we do.