Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

Cooperative Learning Thomas Friedman author of The World is Flat, says today's students need to be able to learn and produce cooperatively. (2005) According to a chart of the average students retention rate produced by the National Training Laboratories are the following findings:
Lecture less than 10%, Reading 10%, Audiovisual 20%, Demonstration 30% Discussion 50%, Practice doing 75%, Teacher others 90%. Keeping this in mind, if students are collaborating, their retention rate will greatly increase.

Mrs. Ortiz's students are given the opportunity to work independently, in pair and groups. They are not only collaborating and communication they are also required to teach their information to the rest of the class. Students need to know the expectations and have the opportunity to set goals as to what grade they are striving for.

Keypals are a wonderful way to communicate and collaborate. I have used e-pals and I am able to view each e-mail sent or received. The e-mail program will flag possible Spam and inappropriate mail. Students love to learn what they have in common with others. There are also wonderful projects. The site is sponsored by National Geographic.

My students love WebQuest. The Quest usually requires collaboration with student working as teams. There are 100's of WebQuest on the internet. For classroom that do not have computers for students WebQuest still can be done, the teacher needs to go to the links and print out a copy of the information for each team.

Besides the Website creating programs mentioned in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works a few others are: GeoCities. Microsoft Word and Power Point, and Google Sites. I prefer to use a blog rather than a website.

Collaboration Organization
Shared Calendars can be used for collaborating students to schedule dates for different components of their projects. Google Calendars are easy to use and post to the web.

Student often become frustrated when they change computers and can not locate and use their favorites or bookmarks. Social bookmarking not only solves this problem but also allows the sharing of bookmarks with others. Del.icio.us is the social bookmarking I use.

Communication Software
Skype is a useful way to communicate, collaborate with others. You can chat, talk through the computer and actually see each other. Since Skype does interfere with band width I recently had an overnight Skype Night. My students were able to see and visit with others in Sweden, Germany, China, India, Australia and England. The learned about the different school systems, history and cultures.

Communicating, Collaborating and cooperation are 21st Century Skills students need to be proficent with to be successful in like. Not allow our students to use this skills is doing a huge disservice to our students.