Continuing Our Group Work

Good Afternoon Students

            Don’t forget who was in the group you worked with in class today because we will be continuing our work throughout the week.  Keep in mind that we will be backchannelling our learning so making notes as you complete the activity might be helpful. Also remember to bring in your headphones so we can watch our videos on Friday!

Dear Parents

            Often in class we work in small groups using a teaching model called cooperative group work. Since this month in our classroom we have been focussing on technology, I thought I would share with you some technological activities and tools that we use in our classroom and the reason why we use them. 

            One activity type uses in cooperative group work is backchannelling. Backchannelling consists of students sharing their knowledge about what they have learned using a social networking sight such as twitter. In our classroom we use a private group so that only our classmates are able to read our posts. Using backchannelling is great for cooperative work because each student becomes the expert in one area and then teaches it to the rest of their group. 

            Another activity type we use is known as online tutorials. When using our online tutorials students are placed in groups and even though each students is completing his or her own tutorial, if ever there are any problems the students work as a group to sort them out.  Each group in the class can be working on a different tutorial at one time and then the groups can rotate through each tutorial until they have competed each one. Online tutorials are great activities to use in any classroom.  They can be used to each just about any subject matter but another great learning activity that tutorial provide is that the students can create their own tutorial to teach a skill or lesson to the rest of the class. Having students create a tutorial solidifies their understanding of the material and can be a fun learning experience.

            Several technological tools that have been utilized in our classroom so far are twitter, moviemaker, audacity, sliderocket, and the smart board. Twitter can be used for students to backchannel their learning, where the other tools are all great for presentation purposes.  Cooperative learning lends itself well to creating presentations because each student in a group can have an area of expertise or each group can be responsible for creating one collaborative presentation. For example, the students can use sliderocket to make a digital story in which they need to include edited videos and images.

            There are several benefits of having students work in cooperative groups such as it builds social skills and the students are required to work as a team with their peers. It also allows for the students to build problem solving skills as the students use their peers instead of the teacher when they are unsure of something. Cooperative group work helps students to be able to learn at their own pace while being exposed to others’ viewpoints and approached to completing a task. Lastly, cooperative group work frees up some of the teachers time which allows for assessment opportunities where I can walk around the class observing the learning and spending time with students in smaller groups.

Image taken from freedigitalphotos.net. Created by Photostock.