Earlier on in my older postings, you would have come to realise that my partner (Catherine Welburn) and I did not exactly find much time together to share our thoughts on the learning theories. None the less, we chose the topic of Constructivism and carried out a P.M.I. (Plus, Minus & Interesting) to analyse the information and research that was presented to us. We found the P.M.I method to be very successful and simple to understand, however, as we completed our P.M.I. in a table and went to upload onto the learning theories wiki, we came to realise there had been another mishap with the wiki where another student had managed to save their work on top of the content on moodle. Still to this day, we have not been able to upload this but you can now see it on my blog in bright colours.
I suppose what I can learn from this is to never rely on digital technology tools in the classroom as you never know what may occur. You always need a backup plan. I would love to have seen what other GDLT students uploaded for our topic and also other topics associated with this wiki, and fingers crossed maybe tomorrow, you never know!
Despite the wiki troubles for this week, the idea of sharing the workload with a class can be an incredible way of thinking and learning from one another. It brings together so many different views, opinions, new debate topics and extensive research to have thoroughly been analysed and assessed then uploaded back onto the wiki for everyone else to read, such as the jigsaw strategy shown in this wiki. Therefore, even though I haven’t been able to use this wiki to its full potential, I can see how it works and why you would use it for teaching.
We, as students would have shown different behaviourisms when creating the PMI or any other analysing tool for that matter. The things that may influence our behaviour include how you may or may not have interpreted the readings, your understanding of these readings, how you may have felt about displaying the analysis and knowing this once again is an assessment item which becomes quite obvious in the detailed posting we upload, such as this one.
As a constructivist s approach, this wiki allowed the students to collaborate in their groups to discuss topics and share opinions with everyone. This I believe worked well.
As a connectivist's approach, the network of students sharing this wiki enables us to know where we can access more information and research if our understandings of a topic are unclear.
Today, I can now put into perspective using wiki’s in the classroom. It can be used for a vast range of topics and as a great example of a wiki being used in a classroom for me could perhaps be a history class.
This is where I think that from kindergarten to grade twelve, students would not have been able to cover all of our world’s history. So in a wiki I could separate my class into smaller groups and give them each a specific country to find out as much as possible and construct a time-line of events that occurred in that country which has made it what it is today. When they have uploaded their time-line of events for their country, they can then go on to discuss the other students group work and add to their wiki's. Not forgetting that this would all be scaffolded wonderfully!
No comments:
Post a Comment