This week in 525, we focused on cooperative learning and reinforcing effort.
What is the purpose of asking students to work cooperatively?
Cooperative learning can be a very powerful tool to use in the classroom. Students get the opportunity to work with others and share ideas and talents. It is important for students to learn to work with others that they may not be comfortable working with, since that would most likely happen when they are adults in the workplace.
Our first task was to explore It's a Wild Ride! This project is an interdisciplinary project where students work together to create a new roller coaster ride for an amusement park. The project incorporates the four main content areas throughout the different phases. While I think this is a great project, I am a bit surprised that other content areas weren't considered. Tech ed standards could be considered for the engineering of the roller coaster and business ed could be considered to help market the roller coaster. (But, I guess that is just me being biased to my teaching area!) Overall, the project seems to incorporate many important ideas. The students are working together, several content areas are linked together to answer the student question of "When am I ever going to use this in my life?", and it gives the students clear guidelines to follow.
Next, we had to watch two videos by Clay Shirky, Institutions vs. collaboration and How cognitive surplus will change the world. In the first video, Clay was talking about people collaborating via the internet and used the example of Flickr. His point showed how collaboration typically works, in my opinion, especially when high school students are involved. It showed how one person typically contributes the most work and the other collaborators differ in how much they contribute. I see this often when my students are doing group projects. The second video discussed how cognitive surplus is used. Clay told us that cognitive surplus is the ability for the world's population to volunteer, contribute, and collaborate on large, and sometimes, global projects. There are two things that make up cognitive surplus: the world's free time and talents and media tools that allow more than consuming, they allow creation and sharing as well. Cognitive surplus can be a powerful tool for students. Technology will allow them to increase their "surplus" of knowledge and also share their knowledge.
