In my last post I spoke on Weblogs being the next frontier
in student collaboration. To build upon that notion, I will take a look at some
successful collaboration actively going on in all genres of education.
I found an interesting blog by Joshua Block a High School Humanities teacher at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Read his story here: Creating Successful Collaborations posted on Edutopia.org website.
Joshua’s blog not only talks about how beneficial these
real-world experiences can be, but he also speaks on how the wrong
collaborations can be just as detrimental. He talks about finding “the right mix”
– the key to any cooperative learning environment both inside the classroom and
online. It is at the heart of the
constructivist approach to encourage and foster team work and collaboration to
develop individual thought and communication skills on a broader spectrum. However, there still needs to be a rhyme and
reason to how we approach these collaborations.
Again, blogs demand interaction.
They must ask readers to think and to respond (Richardson, 2010). Block states that his online collaborations “gives
our students access to experts and experiences that transform all of us,
students and teachers alike” (Block, 2013) and isn’t that what the “Read/Write
Web” (Richardson, 2010) should be about?
Sources:
Block, J. (2013). Creating successful collaborations. Edutopia.org. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/on-collaboration-joshua-block
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other
powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
The guidelines for successful classroom collaborations were very interesting! I have actually had guest speakers who don't really know how to communicate with young children and the kids sense it right away. Finding the right mix is so important!
ReplyDeleteOn a similar note, I have taught my first graders how to collaborate. They know the word well. Today, my students loved a social studies lesson we did and they complimented me by telling me I did a really good job thinking of the idea. Aren't they cute? I told them I collaborated with another teacher to come up with the idea and that two people can think of better ideas than just one person. I overhead a little girl say, "Collaboration is really just working together."