Session+7

__7.1 Collaboration__

 * 1) What is collaboration?
 * 2) What are 3 ways in which students collaborate in your classroom and are they successful?

1. Collaboration is when 2 or more people work and cooperate together usually to produce an end product or idea.

2. 3 ways students collaborate in my classroom are when they work as partners on a project, use the methods of Think Write Pair Share and Turn and Talk. I would say that collaboration in middle school is //mostly// successful. Students themselves have told me that they enjoy working with a partner because they have someone to "bounce" ideas off of, the other student can think of ideas they never thought of and working together just makes learning more fun. Of course, as a teacher, there are some hurdles to overcome...students blabbing when they should be working, one student not doing his fair share, veering wildly off topic, students not cooperating and disorganization...to name a few.

__ 7.2 Video Response __

 * 1) How can expanded use of technology help develop depth and breadth for our students?
 * 2) What is the difference between cooperation and collaboration?
 * 3) What are the challenges in getting students to collaborate rather than just cooperating?

1. Students using technology will develop more depth and breadth of the knowledge required by first being interested in using technology. Students want to use technology because of the cool factor. Once we get them interested, they will likely be more focused and motivated. This interest will cause them to seek out multiple modalities and sites with more information increasing the depth of their knowledge base. Expanding the breadth using technology would require precision on the part of the instructor. Because the Internet is vast, middle school students could simply get lost in the universe of technology and wander completely off topic or lose interest. Widening the breadth of a subject can be tricky since the middle school curricula is more specific than broad. Instructors need to decide which is more important since time constraints prevent teachers from doing both to any extent. 2. Cooperation is necessary for successful collaboration especially at the middle school level. When students do not get along or refuse to listen to their peers, absolutely no work gets done and projects descend into bickering and finger-pointing. With some teacher direction, students who don't get along can get some work done. However, it is necessary for the teacher to essentially babysit those students to make sure the work is being done and done properly.

True collaborating involves all parties presenting ideas to the group to get a project done. It involves creative thinking on the parts of all group members. Everyone involved has to step back from their preconceived notions and truly think about another person's ideas and how they might work.

3. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is getting students to "think". If a subject is unknown, getting students to try and think about a topic is a huge challenge. Many times, students don't know what they don't know. **//The trick is to get them thinking on a very basic level and scaffold the ideas from there//**. I always tell students that they probably know more about a particular topic than they think they do. Unfortunately, for many 7th graders, their first "go to" is "I don't know anything about Hominids, Mesopotamia, Greece, etc..." If a student stubbornly refuses to think at all, it is detrimental to their partner or group. This "unthinking" student now becomes a hinderance to the group in getting work done. Oftentimes, one creative student will spend some time with this kind of kid and try to get them to think about the topic. Peer pressure sometimes works better than teacher pressure :)

A VoiceThread is a multimedia slide show that contains images, documents and videos. A VoiceThread allows people to collaborate as they work, move around the pages and leave comments in various ways such as using their own voice, text, audio file, or video (via a webcam).

My initial impression is "cool!" However, Voicethread, Glogster and Prezi have some similar features. All allow video uploads, text notes and are not too difficult to use with proper instruction. Voicethread adds a personal touch that students would love. Since getting many kids to write can be a challenge, if they were allowed to just speak their ideas without worrying about grammar, rough drafts, final copies and proper set-up, Voicethread might be the key to deeper thought.

Voicethread would also be an ideal method of taking notes if students had their own wikipages. They would use multiple ways to embed ideas: pictures, video, doodling, text and their own voice. I think students would enjoy taking notes this way, but would most definitely need instruction on how to do this properly.

__** 7.4 Immigration V//oicethread// **__
Comment on the positives you saw and heard in this Voicethread and some aspects that you could see being improved upon.

Positives: lots of different students got to weigh in on the subject, some students might just like the idea of saying their ideas rather than writing them down, having prepared responses gave the voicethread a more polished appearance, narrowing down the topic by asking specific questions kept students on topic

Challenges: some students ideas couldn't be heard even if I turned up the volume all the way, little response variety...all ideas were presented orally, couldn't listen to the original video of Arizona govenor or Obama, there was some repetition of ideas, almost all students disagreed with the laws but only a few came up with specific reasons why (unconstitutional).