Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Collaborative Learning and Social Learning Theories
The strategies that I read about this week are directly related to social learning theories. Each strategy involved students working together to accomplish a goal. Using multimedia to develop a project can be done alone, but with a group of students, there tends to be more creativity, more support, and more fun. Also, since the work is being shared, the group has a chance to incorporate more than one source to display their ideas. I thought that most of the web resources that were discussed were mediocre for social learning because they seemed unnecessary, but I do think that the communication abilities that the web offers allows students to stay interacted with each other regardless of their location. Now students can work on a project and simultaneously communicate while each person is at their own home. I was surprised that the text did not mention skype because I think that resource will allow students the visual communication that they are used to. In addition, most of the communication sources that use the net allow people to share files. This is nice because the students can send each other their work, get their opinions, and get it back to edit. This allows for constant collaboration and constant support for the learning.
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Erus,
ReplyDeleteI was also surprised that the text did not mention Skype as a communication tool. I have used Skype in my classroom and my students love it. We have another classroom within our district, but in another school, that we connect with on a weekly basis. When we connect with this class, we exchange a math problem that was created by each class, and discuss the correct answers from the previous week. This type of communication tools is an excellent way to connect with other students outside of our school. I would encourage you to do this if at all possible. Your students will LOVE it!
Sounds great. I am glad that I am not the only one that has thought of it. The only problem I have is the students that do not have access at home. Skype is blocked at our school, so I guess the only chance those students would have is at a local library, but I would think that would be frowned upon.
ReplyDeleteErus,
ReplyDeleteBack in one of our previous classes together we worked on a wiki that created a rating system for educational websites, looking back at that activity, after having learned more about social learning theories, cooperative grouping, etc., do you think there is anything we could have done differently to make our wiki experience more collaborative? Here is the link to the wiki we created just in case you need a reminder of what we created: http://educators4technology.pbworks.com/FrontPage. If I remember correctly, when I group created the wiki we were all really swamped with what was going on with our own classrooms and there wasn’t really an opportunity for us to actually collaborate. It seemed as though we all did our own thing and then pieced it together. Do you think that in doing this we really captured the true collaborative spirit behind creating a wiki?
Thank you,
Courtney