Recently a colleague and I created an interdisciplinary project, between health education and technology education, that teaches a multitude of strategies essential for success in the 21st century. In this project students drive their own learning through creativity and collaborative work to build and program a robot all through non-verbal and written communication. The objective of this project was for students to be exposed to new technological applications and become more proficient communicators and advanced problems solvers. This project was intended to push students outside of their comfort zone and challenge them to find new and creative ways to communicate while accomplish the goal of building and programming their robot.
In this project students used a blog forum through our school districts website for students to communicate back and forth with their team members to build and program this robot that was initially created in the technology education class. Basically we were using the blog as a chat.
I have spent some time reading about the use of blogs in schools and see that the way we were using the blog wasn’t necessarily the most efficient way to apply this tool. Ramaswami’s (2008) article, The prose of blogging, made the world of blogging a little clearer to me. I have always thought of blogs as more of a means to chat with others than to journal and reflect upon ideas. Ramaswami offers a variety of suggestions on how blogging can be used to improve writing strategies and collaboration. Ramaswami’s focus was on enhancing writing techniques through blogging, but through this article I see how I can implement blogging in our project as a more self-reflective tool, where students can go to write about the challenges and barriers they are experiencing with this project (since they are not permitted to use verbal communication). By using the blog as a reflective tool instead of a chat tool we are creating a collaborative environment where students express challenges and can offer suggestions to others on how to overcome these barriers with this project. I have also found more efficient means of collaborating in real time with applications such as Etherpad (http://www.etherpad.com), for students to discuss building and programming ideas that also offer pictures and diagrams to be sent back and forth to help with their construction.
I am amazed everyday at the new and innovative applications available at my fingertips. I love finding new ways to enhance my existing projects and to make class time more efficient as well. I am excited to apply these changes to our project for next quarter to see if they will prove to be successful tools.
This picture is of the Ning we have started working on for this project, http://21stcenturyproblemsolving.ning.com, that offers an easy way to access and monitor the blog along with other tools we will be using this project. The site is under construction but will be up and running soon.
Ramaswami, R. (2008) The pros (and a few cons) of blogging. The Journal. 35(11), 21-25. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Jodi, I would love to hear your analysis of the results you find from revising the purpose of your student's blogs. It is exciting to read about all the different opportunities these discoveries are providing for students. Fantastic post.
ReplyDeletei will be doing the project again in March, and have made several changes. I am working on a Ning and am also adding VoiceThread and Etherpad, so I am very excited to see how things go!
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