Week 6 discussion

I teach 4 groups of grade 6 math and science classes.  There are 21 students in each class.  The school is a private international school in South Korea.  Parents are affluent, well educated, and believe their children’s success lies through the education they receive.  There is a mixture of nationalities but the predominant one being American/Korean.   Many of the American/Korean students attend Saturday school and/or after school tutoring classes called Hogwons.  Most students have their own personal computers with super fast internet access.  At school the students have access to a computer lab and a shared cart of laptops is used between 4 classes.  There is a “SmartBoard” in every classroom.  A class set of digital cameras, and video recorders  are available to sign out for  the middle school.  The school uses a program called “Edline.net” to communicate reports, calendars, assignments, letters, and emails with parents.  It is similar to the program moodle.  

I have tried, though only partially successful to integrate a wiki into the the science class.  The students were to research topics on the different parts of the cell with each part of the cell being its own page which the students were to collaboratively add to.  According to Trilling (2005) inToward Learning Societies, there are 7 C’s of 21st century learning.  This lesson covered collaboration, creativity, communication, and computing.  In theory the lesson should have worked with out any problems, the end result was a bit of a mix up as it was the first exposure the students and I had to a wiki format.  The students all wanted to create their own pages, instead of adding to the collective groups.   This created a big mess of files to sort through...but the collaboration required to create and edit the wiki was beneficial in itself.  Some times the best lessons in life come from when things do not go according to plan.   This led to Trilling (2005) other  21st century life skills, critical thinking and doing and career and learning self reliance.

One new activity which I plan on incorporating into the next lesson I do is a podcast or video cast option.  The students are assigned pages from a text book on the topic of magnetism.  They are to teach the section to their classmates using various areas of Blooms taxonomy, for example singing a song on magnets, doing a play...they will now also be able to integrate a podcast, or video into their instruction.  

The biggest change this lesson will have on the class is the amount of time it takes to complete a collaborative assignment.  It takes more time, which means there has to be less content covered.  It will also make the classroom and lesson more student driven than teacher driven.