Collaboration

One of the things I have been getting my middle school students to do is collaboration on documents for their work. And it has worked out surprisingly well! Some of the tools we ave used for collaboration are: Google Docs, Google slides, Padlet, and just collaborating inside of Edmodo.
The Google products are very easy to use because of the larger work area. Although the doc was tricky since I limited them to keeping all the work on one page. Padlet is a nice area to share information. Depending on the layout of the posts (I used stream) this can have an effect on the organization. One of my favorite collaboration projects was to work in their small group in Edmodo doing research about the history of Big Tex. Their group had to divide the jobs up and only one person could input the information on the timeline. (We use the timeline from ReadWriteThink. Excellent resource.) The info that they found had to be posted in their small group for the Timeline person. They also had to find links to images to use. The project worked well and everyone's timelines turned out nicely. I believe that teaching students to work in collaborative groups is an important skill and helps them become an asset to their future employers.

Remnants of past conferences- Exit Cards

 

I am sitting here going through a pile of flyers, business cards, conference programs, etc., that I picked up from some of the different conferences I attended recently. It was one of those things I said to myself "I'll go through this at home when I have more time". HA! I'm actually looking right now at a program from 2010. Seriously?

Well in the midst of all the junk (and the throw away pile is much larger than the keep pile) I am finding a few things worth keeping and repeating. I thought I would share them with anyone who happens to find my ramblings here.

A find worth mentioning was from a talk on Assessment. I remember this one. I felt it was important to hear what they said but I do remember it was not a very stimulating talk. Good information: Bad delivery. However- what I found in my pile here was about EXIT CARDS. Many of you probably have used exit cards before and I have heard different questions, etc, that teachers use. Maybe you will like this one. They suggested a 321 CARD:

• 3 things I learned
• 2 questions I still have
• 1 way I see _______ used in the world around me.

It was the last part of that that I really like. I think that is one of the most important things teachers need to remember the relevance of what we teach to the students' life. We really need to consider that if they do not see how it benefits them, unfortunately they probably don't care.

Tech tools to use for your 321 CARD? How about Socrative? I talked about that in the last post. Another you could use is Padlet (formerly known as WallWisher). I like Padlet, which is like a bulletin board with sticky notes, because you can make it private and you can moderate the posts. And it's close relative Primary Wall that is very similar but geared toward the lower elementary crowd.