The COWs in our English quad are booked every day pretty much now until May and now that I can only get them once a week, I want to maximize my time when the students have them. I don't have any assignments do on Friday, so that we won't waste precious minutes working on the computer.
One of my frustrations in running this project has been that many of the students, when they have the laptops, don't spend their time wisely. I know that this project is supposed to allow students to learn and grow and fail and all that good stuff, but there is a whole lot of nothing going on and the control freak in me is not comfortable with that.
As I planned on doing some weeks ago, there is lesson that students have to do using technology. Two weeks ago I had students create Thinglink.com accounts and create interactive pictures to go along with their 1930s project. It wasn't supposed to take the whole period and didn't need to, but many students enjoyed adding tags and explaining what was going on in the photos that they chose. I had them use creative commons photos from flickr, which was another part of the lesson. Here is the link to the form I had them fill out to collect their work as well as a short tutorial I created so that students knew how to navigate their way around Thinglink and flickr www.bit.ly/thinglinkflickr and www.bit.ly/thinglinkturnin
This past week, I created a problem based research project. We have a ton of seagulls on our campus and I had students research what type of seagulls we had (web searching skills), research solutions in how to get rid of them, and then propose how we could go about warding them off of our campus. Students seemed engaged with the assignment and found some interesting answers. The following link takes you to the template I had students open and then copy so that they can work on their own www.bit.ly/birdproblem.
Students were allowed to work in pairs and they really could've worked collaboratively to do the work more quickly, but not all the students are comfortable or even recognize how they can work together. I viewed the revision history of some of the groups and the ones that truly worked together had both partners filling in the template, while other groups had one person do all the work. This week we have the computers, I'm going to present on what collaboration should really look like and give them a rubric as well.
As far as the 20 Percent Project goes, I've made a couple of big changes. I'm not going to read over 100 student blogs a week, that's a little too much. Instead I'm going to grade/review them at the end of the quarter. I think that the ideal thing to do will be to grade/review them midway through each quarter.
Next year, I think I'm going to make the project two separate semester long projects, rather than a year-long as without any urgency, not a lot of work gets done. Also, I'm going to have students really plan out what everyone's role will be, because some of the students have an idea and they don't have a plan to bring their idea to fruition.
Excited to share about this week's progress later. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
