Investigate Collaborate Learn!
Published September 16, 2007 by Rick Biche
After having seen some great examples of student collaborative projects such as those by Kim Cofino, Clarence Fisher, Chris Craft, The Horizons Project, and the Flat Classroom Project, I am inspired to give it a try. My goals are simple, facilitate a collaborative project with one or more other classrooms that addresses key learning targets in my curriculum.
I would like to extend an official invitation to join my class (grade 8 ) and I on a product design collaboration. I have posted the beginnings of my ideas on the distance collaborations forum at classroom 2.0. I am hoping the collaboration will begin with a cooperating teacher in designing the project together. Below are my rough ideas so far, but I am certainly open to others:
I saw a post by Mr. Zehring about a simple product design assignment using straws. The basic idea was to build something and illustrate a science principle. So, taking off on that I envision:
- teams will design and create a product that does something (defined as work) out of straws (or popcycle sticks, or toothpicks, or ???)
- Each team consists of two halves, half from my room, half from somewhere else (that is you!)
- The product must be built as two pieces, neither piece will work without the other and cannot simply be replicas of each other.
- Each team constructs half the product while collaborating on the whole product (lots of communication, measuring, planning, teamwork…here)
- Each team builds two exact replicas of their part of the product, sending one replica to the other half of the team for final assembly
- Teams now put the products together in the final phase-should be seamless if well designed.
- Videos or slides of the products doing “their thing” are uploaded to a central site.
- Reflections are made
- Celebrations are had!
I don’t know where this will lead but hopefully to some great collaborative, investigative learning! Given that this hasn’t been fully developed yet and I have a student teacher later this fall, I would expect to run this sometime this winter.
If you would like to join me please send me a message through the contact page on this site.
Filed under Middle School, Technology Integration, collaboration, science, student
These are great ideas! I wish I was still working with middle school, because I would happily collaborate with you! I will pass on the link for this post to our middle school tech coordinator to see if he can find anyone at ISB that might be interested. Good luck with your collaboration!
I am said MS tech coordinator…thanks for the pass on Kim!
I will get in touch with my grade 8 math/sci people…sounds like a terrific project.
Kim, thanks for passing this along.
Dennis, thanks too for passing this along. I hope to hear from someone. I can be pretty flexible with this project and ideally would love to collaboratively develop it.
What a cool idea..now what would this sort of thing look like in a Social studies room….or if you were to team up with a science room, and then also connected two distant social studies rooms, what could the role of the SS classes be?
Interesting question Paul. Now Social Studies is probably the area I know (educationally) the least about. But, what comes to mind first is that technology can influence societal changes. What are the implications of a world where those involved in product design and development do not have to be in the same building, town, state, …? How does this use of technology effect things like our workforce and workforce issues? Are we on our way to more independent contractor types of jobs and how does this affect society or does it? I guess I am going down the Flat World path here. So I would say that a social studies class could be a part of the project by doing the project but taking the lead in the follow up processing. For example if a wiki with shared videos were to be the end result, why not add some reflections about the project or link to student blog posts on these reflections. Social Studies and Science class students may begin with different direction in the assignment of their posts but through reading and commenting perhaps the kids could connect the ideas together.
Any other thoughts?