Module+2+--+Communication+and+Collaboration

NETS Addressed

Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.

Students will: Participants will be able to:
 * interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
 * communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats.
 * develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.
 * contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.
 * Choose the most effective communication tool for meeting the content standard.
 * Exhibit cultural understanding and global awareness by participating in collaborative projects
 * will be able to choose the most effective communication tool for meeting the content standard.
 * will be able to exhibit cultural understanding and global awareness by participating in collaborative projects.

Wiki Review

So I started off by looking at a variety of examples, and some made a lot more sense than others. For example, Code Blue was an interesting site, and I thought there was a good start in place, but what I don't understand is how was this created? Specifically, how was the work divided up? We go from what looks like introductory paragraphs about the student "doctors" to whole sections of information about diseases and conditions. Did the students look up this information? If so, it seems drastically different from one page to the next. I like the idea of setting up a "hospital" with pictures and such, but I don't seem to understand the division of work on this page.

On the other hand, I thought A Broken World (ABW) and Dorman's Daily Digest (DDD) were EXCELLENT. With reference to ABW, the pictures, maps and videos were a nice touch. I thought adding in student lectures that, I assume, were filmed in class would be a great aid in aiding students to comprehend the lesson. Sometimes we cannot get through to students, but all it takes is another student's explanation (and sometimes EXACTLY the same explanation) for the "A-ha" light to go on. I liked that I was able to follow who exactly was responsible for the content as it was directly attributed to certain groups. This is the kind of thing I can get behind -- break the students into pairs or small groups and hold them accountable for their portion of the information. Use parts to build the whole. I have done this many times in class, either with information or reviewing separate chapters of a novel.

DDD seemed to be focused more upon being a notes and review site for this teacher's course, and I think that's perfectly fine as well. I have many students who could care less about copying notes from the board during class. Ok, fine. Now you can download them and print them out. I think this would be a tremendous help to some of our auditory learners who choose not to copy the written notes in class. On the other hand, I always feel you need to write something down in order to truly grasp it, so there are two sides to this. I definitely would use the idea of presenting your notes to the class online. I think it would help my classes more with things like novel discussions, but day to day activities could be useful on there as well. I'm not sure how much DDD fits into our discussion for having student collaborate, as it seems to be primarily the teacher's content (unless I read it wrong) but there is plenty of good content here to emulate.

Artifacts Referenced

A Broken World Code Blue [|Dorman Data Digest]

[|Google Forms] Yes, it is very basic. I used the example to create my own.

Thoughts on Outside Collaboration

In looking at the various sites for collaboration possibilities, one that I thought was really interesting was the ePals Global Community site. The various project ideas could be extremely useful in my classroom, as many of them seem tailor-made for 7th graders. I always find it valuable to look at other cultures and observe both the similarities and differences from our own. This site seems to provide not only the means for communicating with other groups around the globe but also a framework for educators to follow in their lesson plans. This is something that I appreciate as I think the whole concept of interacting with other classes around the globe is a good one, but where do you begin? How do you go about setting this up?

Two in particular stood out to me. First, the digital storytelling unit would work beautifully in my class. Students are always eager to share their created stories, but this help to vary things quite a bit. After all, the old saying is that we "write what we know", but obviously what we know in rural PA is vastly different from urban PA, let alone other countries of the world. How might our experiences be different from those in Philadelphia, London, Tokyo? Then again, the students might just find that their lives are not much different from other kids around the world. As I was in Mexico, I said to my wife often how much the Mexican villages that we passed through looked remarkably similar to Smethport in their various states of decay. It could be an eye-opening experience for the students to share with others.

Secondly, since we already discuss this to a degree, the holidays and festivals unit could be interesting as well. An outsider to schools might not believe how little students know of celebrations around the world. Just in one instance, we talk about varying Christmas / holiday traditions every December. That time of the year alone has dozens of variations, not to mention the rest of the year!

I think the sections for teachers and students are equally well-designed and easy to use. Using National Geographic as an aid also helps enhance students' reading abilities and world comprehension. This is definitely a site I have bookmarked and will use this fall.

<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 150%;">[|EPals]

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 150%;">Voice Thread Activity

I read and looked at the Voice Thread online tools for this assignment. At first, I wasn't really sure what to make of it. After all, it seemed like a neat concept but somewhat superfluous. I kept thinking to myself during the intro video, "What's the big deal?" I could see where being able to comment and leave audio commentary could be good, but what purpose would it have for our classroom? I'm glad to say that I was wrong to jump to conclusions on this tool.

Once again, using this for my English class background, voice threads can be a different form of presentation. I'm not entirely sure that it's something that I would use all the time, or even more than a few times a year, but it can be a nice change of pace activity. The biggest concern I have, going back to the start of the class, is that we do not have a computer lab, nor do I even regularly have a laptop cart or anything like that for my room. We also have many students without computers or internet access. Nevertheless, there are many things to like here.

One video showed a student who had selected a poem, then found pictures which seemed to relate to or describe the poem. Over the top of this, audio of the student reading the poem was recorded. The complete package together would hopefully enable the student to better understand the poem. One other video / slideshow I thought was well done was where the student took pictures of their "7th grade life" and added comments describing the pictures and why they were chosen. I do similar activities to this in my classroom, but utilizing the digital aspects may convince students to participate more.

Lastly, you could do something like with the science video on insects, but I'd like to see more than "This is a (X) and here is a picture of its (Y)." If you could provide more pertinent information, this could be a great review tool for students. Maybe using it in my classroom for parts of speech, novel review, etc.?

Edit: Oops, I misread the question above. I'll keep what I had written and add some more. As for my activity. I would adapt my "final project" that I give to students at the end of the year. I have them choose a novel that either we have read together throughout the year or that they have read on their own.

They then make an "alphabet book" from A to Z by selecting a word, phrase, character, location, etc. for each letter of the alphabet and pertaining to the novel. For example, A could be a character named Adam, B could be Boston and they would have to explain who Adam is or why Boston is important. C could be courageous, and they need to give me an explanation as to who was courageous and why.

Since I have them provide pictures for their descriptions, it would be an easy transition to create a voice thread instead. They could find pictures online (which many of them do anyway and print), post them into the voice thread, then either type their comments (as they would on the paper version) or record their voice describing each letter.

They certainly could do this from A to Z and the final project would aid them in understanding and recalling the novel that they had read.

<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 150%;">[|Voice Thread]

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 150%;">Internet Discussion Summary

It looks as if the various instructors in our class have many different forms of filtering in their schools. This is not surprising as each school district has its own thoughts and opinions on how this should be done. Some use more universal blocking of wikis and blogs, while others are more liberal.

I think a common thread is that is it frustrating, and as Afton mentioned, sometimes school districts block things from day to day seemingly at random. I have encountered this over the years myself, as certain sites go blocked then unblocked. Youtube was one such site that was banned for a long time, but now it's open, only for teachers. Thus, I suspect somebody brought it up to the right people. Perhaps this is the right idea, forming a document for teachers to organize a list of sites that should be allowed.

Like others have mentioned, I also dislike that certain sites get blocked for no apparent reason. "Game" is one keyword that can get a site blocked. While we don't want students playing games in school online, there are plenty that they can access. Additionally, when there are particular sites that I want to use that happen to use that word somewhere, it becomes a disturbance.