Module 4-Receive, Read, Respond

This week's topic focused on Contribution and Collaboration in group projects, shortened to "Receive, Read, and Respond". It is important for our students participating in global projects to understand this. I have had many students in my five experiences with FCP's disappointed because they felt they were the "only ones" doing any work. Don't we, as teachers, become upset when we feel that no one is responding to us in the classroom? Receiving and Reading is not enough. The response is critical to the collaboration process.

Many times the fault lies with the student. There is always that "overachiever" student who goes in, does a lot of initial work, but doesn't feel the need to accept any criticism or do any actual collaboration. These are the students used to "doing all the work themselves" through learned experiences with group projects in the past. These are also usually the students highly concerned about their grade on the project over all else. These are the students who, when they discover that someone has come and editted their work and made changes, will come complain to their teacher that "someone has gone in and completely ruined the project". Also-there is the reverse. This is the student, through learned experiences with group projects, who sits back and LETS everyone else do all the work. These are the ones who don't respond, since they fell like their opinions won't ultimately matter or someone else will just pick up the slack.

Sometimes the fault lies with the teacher. Sorry guys, I will pick on you. There is always a teacher or two in the project who just doesn't "get" the project. They are more focused on the research and knowledge aspect of the project than on learning collaboration and Web 2.o skills. These are the teachers who will encourage their students NOT to collaborate, because they are convinced the REST of the teachers don't "get" that this is a research project and the collaboration come second to the topic learning. Also-we have the teachers who are 3-4 weeks behind everyone else and are then upset when they feel work has gone on without their classes. this is where shared calendars and timelines become very, very important.

I will share a couple of interesting stories that have happened while my classes have been working on wiki collaboration projects. Last year, when I asked for reflections after a Flat Classroom project had been completed, I had several students mention that they were very surprised at the motivation level of some of their peers at other schools. "Ms. Clayton-these kids actually CARED about doing a good job and learning something" one said. The attitude rubbed off on some of my students; unfortunately, some of my students still thought these "other kids" were a little crazy. Note that I did this project in a classroom of kid who were mostly low level learners from who little had been expected before. Hmm. There is a lesson there.

The second also happened in the same classroom with a girl who found out that another student she was working with, who was now living in the Middle East, had spent some time living in Houston. They discussed The Galleria, a high end shopping mall, that the student living in the Middle East dearly missed. These two students decided to collaborate with each other on the end of project video by providing outsourcing clips of each other at a shopping mall in their respective cities. Because they had bonded, they collaborated without anyone pushing them!

Challenges this week were to participate in a group wiki project, and to also assess. I have each class I teach work on wikis form the beginning so that when we do collaboration projects, they are already very familiar with the process.

Here is my very first effort http://whswega.wikispaces.com which was a wiki dictionary of vocabulary needed for the Digiteen project. Here is an example of a class wiki for one of my "Rock Band" capstone projects for Digital Media last year http://dimm1.wikispaces.com . Here is one currrently in process for my Global Business Class http://whsglobalbiz.wikispaces.com I have come a long way with these! Students seem to have no problem grasping the concept of a wiki and why we use them. However, I did have a current student, when asked to add new content to her wiki this week, ask if she was supposed to erase all of the old work. No, I explained, we add to it all year and then we have one BIG project at the end. You mean-she asked-can I go back and change stuff I didn't understand at first but now I do? YES! Smiles.

As for assessing--boy, this has been a tough one for me. I HATE assessing wikis. The rubrics have helped. But here is till the "if you tell them they must write 250 word they will write 249 words" issue--it almost represents a paradigm shift in grading that unfortunately the rest of my colleagues have not yet caught up with and kids don't quite buy into. any ideas would be great!