“Joining Forces in Purposeful Work: the Legacy of Student Contribution” – Alan November

November describes two history teachers Michael and Garth who over the years have worked with their classes to produce an online history wiki textbook.  The two classes (in different schools) both contribute, as well as other visitors who come upon the site and have something to say.  I’m still a little confused about whether Michael and Garth actually directly teach the students any history content which the students then record, or whether they simply pointed them in the right directions and kept an eye on progress….

I don’t think I’ll be doing anything revolutionary like creating an online textbook, but with two classes last week I tried out using Googledocs to produce different sections of a collaborative summary/revision guide.  This was most successful as a class activity, rather than as homework because sometimes students within the small group working on a section at home didn’t carry their weight and left it up to others, whereas in class everyone was actively working on it.  It was much faster to produce than expected, and I was able to check it for accuracy and add in extra information afterwards.  A weaker student told me later that he felt more confident about using it for personal review, since all of the key points were addressed, and had been checked by me.  (I was very prescriptive in my instructions, that students must include all keywords and learning outcomes, as well as any interesting additional information.)

November quotes Garth:

“The process of education is collaboration.  The idea of school should be collaboration and communication with people that are different from you and see the world with different eyes.”

I was inspired to contact some of my ex-colleagues in the UK, as well as my brother in law to collaborate in a small way with my g7 science project.  The students are making VoiceThreads on the human body systems.  They will finish them at the beginning of this week, so telling them on Monday that they’ll have students viewing and commenting from England should some extra good motivation.  We’ll see!

Made in Taiwan…

… viewed and commented in the UK.

For those signed up to VoiceThread, here’s a quick taster about AIDS and HIV which a couple of students made during “sandbox time” before starting the bigger body systems project.

AIDS and HIV mini VoiceThread

Images:  Can’t work out how to get them to go alongside each other…. but at least managed to get the image up using the URLs.  Thanks for the instructions, Stacey!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_map_of_the_United_Kingdom_1801-1922.svg