The Front Lawn
Saving the World through Educational TechnologyArchive for Collaboration
Making Global Projects Work by Jeff Whipple
Jeff Whipple is a major proponent of Global Collaborative Projects (GCPs). He talks about tools, what they look like, and why we should engage in them.
Jeff believes that students need to reach out to get to know students from other parts of the world, and see how students with different backgrounds can share the same story. Do we really want the rest of the world’s kids to think that Bart Simpson is the voice of America’s youth? Similarly, do we want our kids to believe that all students in Pakistan are right wing extremists in the making? Probably not.
An example of a GCP was an exchange betten Nashwaaksis Midle School and the American School of Bombay. Heather, a middle school teacher at Nashwaaksis, took on a project from the previous year and began the project with a gift exchange sent through the mail. The project is housed in a Wiki and the two schools began by describing their schools and putting in all their names and profiles. The goal of the project was to practice their French as this was a language course. They made a movie about themselves in French introducing something special about each of them. Students from both schools would then comment in French on the videos posted.
After this, several topics would be edited collaboratively by a few students describing something about the culture, the weather, or the community for example. Heather claims students were working on the Wiki outside of class on weekends, over Christmas break and at all hours of the day and night. Students in Heather’s class got into the project at the same time as the attacks in Mumbai, which gave a special context to the project.
Several stipulations were made to ensure the success of the project which included using 75% or more authentic, student-generated content. Other precaustions were to keep to start small, one small class to begin with is a good idea. Kids were also in agreement that they could not contact the students outside of class and students pictures were not going to be used online. Another key to success are to get involved with existing projects and suggests you visit http://whipple-web20.wikispaces.com under global collaborative projects.
Jeff goes on to explain that GCPs help with several 21st century learning goals including digital citizenship, information literacy, copyright considerations, and your digital footprint.
More on Google Docs.
Google Apps is undoubtedly the early form of a technology that will eventually take over in one way or another. I love this tool. In spite of its quirks I love the very notion of what it’s trying to do. I’ve been using it and sharing it for four years now and its just starting to catch on.
The ultimate goal is connectedness and the ability to share, collaborate, search for, and access any document anywhere. Like any organization, the wheels of progress and efficiency are currently bound up by private cells of information that shouldn’t be private. Documents hide on desktops, behind the bars of private personal folders, and in shady corners of shared drives. Even those that are shared are uselessly tucked away in an arcane directory that only the creator understands the logic behind. What if the intellectual property of a school could be liberated the way the worlds intellectual property has been? This is the premise behind web 1.0-era collaborative tools such as Rubicon Atlas which has attempted to collect school curriculum in a database that teachers will use to search for materials, reflections, and assessments. It is doomed to failure, but not until millions of teachers waste valuable time and energy doing tedious data entry work instead of actually collaborating.
If you put on your student-centered cap, Google Apps has so much to offer, far too much to cover in a short blog post, but perhaps you’ve had a chance to try the mini-debate from a previous post. If not you may also try having science students collect lab data in shared spreadsheets, collaborate on powerpoints before a presentation, or work on an essay together in docs.
Eventually we will all be up in the cloud; though many naysayers doubt the security or plausibility of it, it just makes so much more sense. For the educators, there is little if anything that merits hardcore security measures. If we can focus more on what should be shared rather than what should be secured, we may soon find ourselves in a more progressive teaching environment.
Conducting a Mini-Debate in Google Docs
As a social studies teacher, I have found the debate format to be a highly successful way of introducing social and ethical issues to my students. Most of the other methods have met with mixed success; class discussions often tend to skim issues due to a few dominant speakers, and position papers leave students with a one-sided exposure. The debate, on the other hand, encourages students to dig a bit deeper, do a bit more research, and both listen to and consider other sides of the argument.
The problem with debates is one of time and logistics. To engage an entire class at once it is usually necessary to have team debates as no class wants to hear the same debate five times over. Groups need time to organize, research, and compile. With so much time required, its not feasible to run a debate very often, and so it becomes something teachers use to introduce debate protocol rather than to engage students in learning concepts. In addition, group work often becomes an individual product rather than a collaborative effort, and thus loses its effectiveness. But what if you could have all of your students simultaneously debating with each other, reduce the cycle to one class period, and be left with a record for assessment and further instruction? That would be a constructivist coup would it not? With a tool like Google Docs you can achieve this.
The way it works is that you set up a document in Google Docs with a prompt and some instructions at the top and a table below for affirmative and negative arguments. You then make several copies of the document and name them 1 – n. You then share the document with 2-6 students (1-3 on a side) and ask them to divide equally among affirmative or negative. Then, they begin writing all at once in the document with arguments that they research or come up with on their own. It works quite well. In a 1:1 environment, each student can add their own points and are not subject to the edits of one dominant group member. They can also have real human conversation while they are doing it.
A sample mini-debate in Google Docs
As the teacher, you can watch the drama unfold by looking at each document from your computer. They are updated real-time so you can see what students have the document open and are adding points. You can even intervene and add comments to the pages to steer students in the right direction. The technology isn’t idiot or vandal proof, however, so it will require a classroom atmosphere of trust and safety for it to work.
That’s not the end of it either. Once the debates have ended, you can then share them with the rest of the class in any number of ways and have students use the data collected to produce some sort of essay or reflective piece that incorporates both sides of the argument. In this way the debate acts as a shared introductory experience necessary for a more critical look at an issue. It’s a lot more fun for the students than an ethics lecture, and they will have more than just a page of notes at the end of it.
To see a sample mini-debate in Google Docs simply click on the snapshot to the right.
