Turning my project into a collaborative one

Hi readers! Todays post is about turning my open educational digital project into a collaborative one.

If you have been following my previous posts, you can check the process that I have been following to prototype my project, but now the idea is go further, incorporating collaboration on it. Lets start, do not miss it, and check it out!!

Here you will find all the steps that I have followed to turn my open educational digital project into a collaborative one.

First of all, I will provide you the definition of collaborative work/learning. Here you can find more information and a good definition of it. I will summarize it and give my opinion according to my project down below.

"Collaborative work/learning is a method of teaching and learning in which students team together to explore a significant question or create a meaningful project."

According to that definition, the collaborative work/learning is conceived as an interesting and essential part of the learning process because. The school is constituted by classrooms and these classrooms are formed by at least 20 students; that means the children need to interact among them. As teachers we have to take advantages of it, fostering collaborative learning and situations with social contexts because as human beings we live in society.

Taking into account these aspects, I have decided to create some activities to my open educational digital project to make it collaborative. Here are the steps to reach the objective:

- The best way to foster collaboration is distributing the classroom in working groups between 4-5 students.

- The next step is to provide them some different roles to facilitate the interaction and the organization in the groups. The roles will be:

• The Manager: This person is in charge of the group.
• The Secretary: Is in charge of helping the manager. This child will be in charge of writing in the group activities.
• The roadrunner: Is in charge of give out the books or the needed materials.
• The spy: Is in charge of keeping the group quiet. Each spy will have a "traffic light" to regulate the level of noise in his/her group.
• The microphone: Is in charge of speaking in his/her group when the group have to present a group activity.

* These roles will change weekly. 

- Giving a different activity/work/challenge to each group. 

- The last step is to exchange all the works and present them to the rest of the class.

The next collaborative activities are going to follow this structure.

Lets say that the classroom is compound by 26 pupils. We will have 4 groups of 4 students and 1 group constituted for 5. That means we have 5 different tasks/works/challenges for them.

1. Creating schemes, summarizing the lesson but they must use drawing on them.

2. Creating flash cards of the unit, using the vocabulary of the lesson.

3. Creating displays of the digestive and excretory systems (and the rest of the systems if they have learnt them) with clay.

4. Creating a newspaper of one part of the lesson. For instance, about diet, they can search articles on the Internet about diet (Healthy and unhealthy habits) and present it in class.

5. Creating a collaborative blog where they will post all their collaborative works. They can add information about their works and also share it with the world. It would be fantastic to create an exchange with other school, showing the way they learn and the different ways of teaching in another country. They can post videos, pictures of their jobs, and add a section for the newspaper. At the end of the academic year, they will have all their progress collected in the blog.

The idea is to see the entire class conceived as a single group. They have to work in small groups to get the same objective: Posting their progress in the blog.

In order to summarize my project and to show the activities and improvements that I have done, I decided to create a poster. The online tool that I have used is canva, I like this tool because it is very easy to use, you can create a poster quickly and easily. I have check other tools but I prefer canva. Here it is my poster, I hope you like it:

Get into shape de Ana Elena Herrera García

As a shelf reflection, I have to say it helps me a lot for improving my project. As a teacher, I consider collaboration an important aspect to incorporate in our classrooms. We can learn from ourselves and from others. The teacher must scaffold all the students, supporting them through their learning process. The teacher must provide feedback to their children to make them think and reflect about their practice.

I hope this post have helped you readers! See you in the next post, do not miss it and check it out!!