Introduction to OER4Schools
The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource
Review of homework and classwork
- In the last session, you planned Talking Points about a topic. Did you try teaching through the talking points during this week? If yes, how did your pupils respond to the talking points? Share your experience about as many points given below:
- Which activity did you use for team building?
- How did you get everybody to participate?
- Were students able to explain their reasoning and understanding to peers?
- Were there ‘free riders’ or individuals dominating the discussion? How did you address this?
- Will you plan Talking Points activity again for your pupils? What changes will you make to the points for this activity, so that they are more effective for group discussion? Some of the things that you can think about, are: number of correct/incorrect/unsure statements, wording of statements, length of statements, concrete and abstract statements.
- Did you recruit any older students as Classroom Assistants this week? For which teaching activity were they recruited? Did you use any criteria for choosing them? What is your assessment of their usefulness for achieving lesson objectives? What is the impact on the learning of the classroom assistants by carrying out this role? Discuss any issues that you faced in recruiting or by recruiting classroom assistants. Remember: it is very important that classroom assistants are recruited with full cooperation of the students, their parents, teachers and the school administration. It needs to be a voluntary activity.
- Did you download or try to download images that could be used with the Talking Points? Share any technology issues that you faced while downloading. Also describe the steps if you were able to resolve them. Otherwise, discuss unresolved issues with your peers for ideas on how they can be resolved.
- While downloading images for Talking Points, did you face any conceptual issues such as availability of images related to the teaching concept or choosing images that were relevant? Did using images improve the effectiveness of Talking Points? Give examples to support your response.
Objectives of this session
- To consolidate learning about group work
- To plan an effective group work activity using ICT
Review of group work
This is the last session focussing specifically on group work. In it we review the key elements of the previous sessions, and then give time to an extended planning task.
Unit 3 on group work covered a number of topics, including same-task and different-tasks group work (3.1), supporting reasoning and managing groupwork (3.2), mixed pace groupwork with and without ICT (3.3), group work with ICT (3.4), and talking points and effective group work (3.5).
Pair work (11 min). Review the previous sessions in pairs (e.g. using your paper handouts or the online version), and make a note of any points that stand out to you, that you found helpful, or would like to raise in the following group discussion. To give an example, you might note down types of group work, and briefly note the three types (“same task groupwork”, carousel-style groupwork, “different tasks groupwork”) and reflect on how you have been able to make progress with your group work in class.
Group discussion (11 min). Share your reflections with the group, perhaps drawing a mindmap of what suggestions are made.
It's important to note down any points that arise, because these will be used in the planning task below.
Further notes on group work
There are many aspects to group work, and over time more things will occur to you, which you should share with your colleagues. For instance, you could think about managing group work outside the classroom, doing group work with additional available resources (e.g. books, newspapers, other technologies). Group work, like all the other interactive techniques we have talked about, will continue to be part of your arsenal of learning techniques, and it will be particularly important for project-based work.
Also, remember to use the ICTs you already know about in group work. For instance, think of innovative ways you can use EtherPad. You might consider trying out group work as follows:
- You do carousel-style group work, where you form groups of 2-4 students: some of those groups work with netbooks, others do another task. For 2-4 students per netbook, say with 12 netbooks, this forms 12 groups, and occupies 24 to 48 students; the other students then do a non-ICT task. We would encourage you to try this with small group, say 2 or 3 using a netbook.
- Then, among the 12 groups with netbooks, 3 groups share an etherpad, that they use for a joint task (i.e. there are 4 etherpads in use at the same time, each EtherPad has contributions from 3 groups only).
Homework
Drawing on the points that arose in the discussion above, plan a group work task, e.g. including different-task group work, talking points in conjunction with the downloaded images, magic microphone, etc. Make sure you include an ICT element, and draw on classroom assistants if possible.
Computer tasks: Remember to keep practising your typing skills! (The awarding of a certificate at the end of the course will also depend on your typing skills!). Also, take some time to explore the other applications installed on your computers, and reflect on how they could be used for interactive teaching and learning.
