Cooperative learning is a skill that is taught as soon as you teach a young child to share their toys or work with their siblings to clean their bedroom. It is imperative that people know how to work together in order to get anything accomplished these days. There are very few careers that call for individual work and people should know that in order to get ahead in their careers, they must learn to work cooperatively. In my classroom, I implement problem based learning on a regular basis. I believe that by having students work together to solve a real life problem, they are building skills that will last a lifetime. They divide tasks and put their heads together to come up with possible solutions.
One aspect of technology that I plan to implement this school year is blogging. I hope that my students will learn to share their thoughts and also to accept responses from their classmates. It is a wonderful alternative to journal writing with paper and pen. It will also give them an insight into how useful technology is to them.
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Owatson
ReplyDeleteI had my students blog last year and it was wonderful. On Mondays I would post a problem (math) and they had until Friday to solve the problem and blog about how they did it. They also had to respond to at least three other classmates about how they solved the problem, or to help them solve it. The students enjoyed it!
I, too, think that blogging is a great alternative to writing. I plan on having my students use the same method this upcoming school year. Currently, no other teachers in my building have their students use blogs. Are there other teachers at your school that do? I also like this idea because it allows parents, and other family members, to instantly access their child's work. No more papers getting lost on the bus or "misplaced"!
ReplyDeleteOletha,
ReplyDeleteI tried blogging last year with my students and it was a great success. They really enjoy replying to a prompt this way, and then reading and commenting on what other classmates have to say. I think if you make it a requirement that they reply to each others' comments, it will make the experience so much more rich, since they will be looking at an issue from many points of view.
Marcella Pugliese
Owatson, I teach second graders and Blogging is new to most of them but once we started and I showed them how. THe assignments and the writing that I started getting was much better thatn the paper assignments I assigned. We basically had the computer lab filled with my kids blogging about the story we were reading in class and any questions they had about the work for the week. It turned out to be very beneficial. Even to second graders.
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