This week I have been thinking about how blogging could be used as a collaborative tool in my elementary school. I teach two classes of math for third grade and I thought about pairing up the students. This way their partner would not be in their class, but it would be a way to communicate with another third grader. However, I would not need to check out the other student since I would already know him or her. I could give each partner a challenge problem and they would need to solve it. The problem could appear in their blog space and then each student would need to access it. The student would then need to write how they would solve the problem and show step by step directions. Each child would then need to communicate with each other on if they are correct or not. This way each child would be checking each other and they could just copy off each other. I would have access to it and they could even get a grade for their own individual work. (It would be very easy to tell if the other person copied work…third graders aren’t extremely practiced at the art of cheating..at least that has been my experience…thank goodness.)
Kim
Kim
BTW the picture came from http://www.wolfswamp.org/pix/math.gif
3 comments:
Having two students from different classes work collaboratively using blogs is a great idea. Have you thought about how you would assess their work?
First I would give them credit for coming up with the correct answer. Then I would need to think about how much detail I was looking for in the explanation. I think I would need to sit down and come up with a rubric so that each group would have a fair chance of doing well. I will need to work on that. Thanks for getting me thinking Deb.
Kim
That sounds like fun. I thought of a fun Language Arts activity that could work in a similar way. One child could start a story in an initial blog, and have their partner add to it and they could go back and forth. Almost like that game you played when you were a kid, where everyone was in a circle and the story started in one spot and each child kept adding to it.
Post a Comment