Chapter 7: Cooperative Learning

Seeing that I will be teaching science this year, for the first time in 7 years, I would like to do something different with my students. I like the idea of using student-created videos to enhance a curricular topic. While this process requires a lot of pre-planning and preparation on the part of the teacher, I think that it would be benificial to the students in the long run. I would like to have students create short video clips in which the demonstrate chemical reactions or even how density columns work. Students would have different responsibilities during the creation of the video clips, working together to produce a solid presentation. I think that it would also be interesting to have the students use multimedia to create some type of interactive journal for future use in the classroom or preceding grade levels.

I also find the idea of keypals very interesting. I've had students in previous years write letters to students in Minnesota, discussing math concepts and comparing processes of instruction and learning. I think that having students use ePals, or even a blog, to keep in contact with students in Minnesota or other states or countries would be benificial. The students could discuss science concepts, such as weather conditions, and journal or blog about the differences in each state/country. This would give the students an opportunity to better understand the types of weather conditions, especially during the different seasons (since our area rarely sees snow, for example). Students could then use their information obtained from their ePals to create charts, or even to complete a compare/contrast graphic organizer.