Collaborative tools fro the 21st Century

The work places of today are filled with collaboration. The higher up in the job fields you go the more collaboration is involved. It is for this reason that must teach students how to collaborate and work as a team if they are to make it in the "real world."
There are several ways that I try to do this in my own classroom. There is usually only a few instances where I require students to work alone and most of those are tests. I feel that when students get out into the work place that they will usually have coworkers working around them. Even in fast foods restaurants you must work as a team to get the orders out in a timely fashion and to the right customer. Then why should we require them to work alone in the classroom.

This week I found several great toll to aid in the collaborative instruction in my classroom. The one that I found the most helpful was from a site called Mission to Learn http://www.missiontolearn.com/2009/08/free-online-collaboration/. this site has great ideas on how to get students involved in classroom collaboration and wanting to learn and work together. There are several great tools on this site that are free, which is a big plus, that worked well in my own class. My favorite was the Stixy program. My students could communicate through it using email or instant messaging. They could do this in class or while they where at home. I think they enjoyed being able to communicate so freely throughout the projects no matter where they were.

http://www.njea.org/news-and-publications/njea-review/march-2011/voicethread

 http://theconnectedclassroom.wikispaces.com/Collaboration_Tools

Week 4 What next?

In this weeks experiment we tested materials ability to fight the forms of heat transfer such as conduction and convection. We where then asked to choose a substance we did not test that we would have liked to. The substances that I chose to test where plastic bags, aluminum foil, cotton rag, and Saran wrap. I would have liked to try one of those thermal blankets you always see people wearing when they have a natural disaster. The seem to be made of a foil looking material and I can bet that they would do better trapping heat than any of my other materials. Heat is trapped or its movement is slowed by the amount of air pockets in certain materials. The more densely packet air pockets the better the R value. This is why the hair of a polar bear is hollow. The air inside helps retain the heat.

My open inquiry design process lesson.

One of the first lessons that I teach is on the engineering design process. I do this through an open inquiry lesson that I try to keep completely student driven. We first briefly talk and discuss the design process as a class. The students then, through a completely open discussion, are asked to give me jobs, scenarios, problems, and research where the design process would be used. As a class they then choose 3-5 of those ideas that they as a class would like to know more about. I go through and make sure they are all classroom feasible and appropriate and let them go.

Students allowed 3-4 in a group and to use the design process in however way they think would best solve the problem of investigate the idea. I try to work as a facilitator of learning in my classroom and not as the know all be all of the subject. This lesson sets that framework. Students are allowed to consult with me or ask me for assistance of any kind. Most of the time they are met with another question to guide their inquiry rather than a solution to their question. We are trying to create self motivated thinking adults and how can they do this if we give just hand out the answers freely.

This lesson usually takes up the first week of real instruction in my classroom. It is a great way for students to learn that they are responsible for their own learning and should see every classroom as a possibility to increase their own knowledge. The design process is a great tool for this. They must learn to follow the appropriate steps to solve and manipulate problems to get to their end goal.

Any suggestions on improvements for my lesson?