Collaboration

 I am becoming more and more convinced that collaboration is the key not only to learning, but to the professional future of our students.  Guy Kawasaki  provides a great post about an article in Psychology Today by Carlin Flora called "Dream Teams," which is a study of collaboration in architecture, music, fashion, robotics. I spend a lot of time teaching collaboration to my students using Web 2.0 tools. 

For example, students in our school have collaborated on a wiki about the Inauguration.  Last year our 4th students, collaborated on a wiki about New York State.  That same group of students scored very well on this year's State Social Studies Assessment. 

I've learned a few techniques regarding wikis in the classroom. The most important is to establish a rule that students not add personal identification to wiki posts.  The emphasis is on the group's product, not the individual's product.  Students still gain satisfaction from recognizing their individual contributions on a wiki, and it's always possible to identify the editors through the history. That, of course, prevents bad behavior in the project.  The wiki method offers the ability for student's to learn individual responsibility and group learning.

Students get excited about a wiki.  One student, who often appears bored in my classes, got very excited after taking the state test.  She informed me that the DBQ portion of the exam had focused on Peter Stuyvesant, and she had written an entire piece on him for our wiki project.

Another tool: Apture

Thanks to Will Richardson (Weblogg-ed) for another tool post: Amazing Add-on for Blogs: Apture. I checked out Apture which is a multimedia tool that allows you to easily add video, audio, text and almost anything else from Web sources or even local files as a pop-up to whatever word or phrase you designate in your post. I plan to try it on our school wikis this week.

VoiceThread

Just tried Adobe's Photoshop Express What a tremendous tool! Another discovery is Voice Thread.
VoiceThread is a tremendous new resource for Web 2.0 instructors. It is an online, interactive album that can hold various types of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - voice (microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (webcam). A VoiceThread allows group conversations,digital stories, oral histories, commentary, etc. to be collected and instantly shared in one place, from anywhere in the world. There is also an educator's version which charges a nominal fee for additional content protection and control. Here is an example:

Flat Classroom Project

I have just become aware of a fantastic resource for collaboration from a teacher in South Korea named Clay Burell. His projects include the flatclassroom, liferoundhere, A Broken World and 1000tales. His blog is http://beyond-school.org/ . I will definitely make use of his ideas. Thanks to Dean Shareski for posting the information on Ideas and Thoughts from an Ed Tech.

Power Point in wikis and blogs

This idea comes from a post by Steve Dembo who authors Digital Passports on Discovery Education: AuthorStream is another tool for incorporating power point presentations into a wiki. The advantage of Authorstream is that it will imbed animation and you can convert to flash. I've checked it out and it is great.

Even the CIA has a Wiki

Even the CIA has a wiki to share information among agencies. Intellipedia is not open to the public, but it uses the same software and technologies.

What is Web 2.0?

Let's begin our discussion of the importance of digital storytelling with a clear understanding of Web 2.0. To understand this concept, take a few minutes to read the article What is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.

How is this significant to you in your profession?