Category Archives: collaboration

Why collaborate outside of your classroom?

Kevin asked this question after reading the challenges of the Scratch collaboration between my class and a class in Vietnam.

        Why not do the collaboration within the class? Is there some reason you have to create all these barriers to collaboration (12-hour time zone changes, …)
 
I appreciate this direct question to the premise of this project. First of all here are some good reasons to collaborate from a previous comment on my blog, but they do not address why one should collaborate outside of an individual classroom.

I believe in exposing students to different points of view. Too often students live in their neighborhoods with people like themselves and do not have an open worldview. For example my district is less than one hour drive from Lake Michigan, yet I have students who have never been there. I value any opportunity to expand my students’ perceptions of the world, in particular about different cultures. Collaborative projects can help students experience. When students Skype with others different from themselves they learn about how they are similar.

Collaboration and learning from/about others is often relegated to social studies/language arts classrooms. Gary and I wanted to do it in a programming situation. I think our goals and ideas were correct. We just did not set up our students well by not giving them opportunities to build relationships first. We had the best intentions but skipped that part due to logistics and time.

So I believe collaborating outside of the classroom is important because:

  • We do not live in a manufacturing based world anymore where kids live in the same small town with people who look just like themselves for their whole lives.
  • Diversity is an important part of the global community, and we need to expose students to as many different kinds of cultures as possible.
  • Collaboration allows students to see how they are the same as well as different from other cultures. The similarities can make as big of impression on them as the differences.
  • I want to model that real learning is not limited to the classroom walls.
  • Collaboration should build relationships between students.

I spent two years teaching English in China and studying Mandarin. I guess I have a strong personal belief in exposing oneself to different cultures and experiences. Many of my students may never have the opportunities to travel and experience new cultures firsthand. We have the technological tools to make these connections in the classroom. I believe that teachers have an obligation to use these tools to give students opportunities to collaborate and learn from as many sources as possible.

    Scratch: collaboration or not?

    I was contacted by Gary Bertoia via twitter about a collaboration project using Scratch. If you are unfamiliar with Scratch, it is an MIT designed software that allows students to create games by clicking and dragging commands rather than using a complicated programming language. It allows students to think about the design and layout of how video games work without having to learn the language. Gary’s idea was to teach our 8th grade classes the basics of the program and then have them design and create their own game together. Oh by the way, Gary teaches at South Saigon International School in Vietnam exactly 12 time zones ahead of us!

    We started by using some instructions in Google Presentations created by Simon Haughton. Students learned the basics of Scratch by designing an Etch-a-Sketch, race car maze, Pong, and Pacman. Then we used a wiki for students to come up with their own game ideas. The first challenge was to match up our classes’ ideas. My class was divided in groups of two and Gary’s students worked in groups of two or three. We then had to bargain with the students to convince them to agree to one anothers’ ideas. It would have been nice to have the students engage in a real discussion about the topics with each other but the time zone difference made that impossible.

    For our first attempt, collaboration might have been more of a goal than a reality. There were many challenges to this project centered around the communication piece. We had many ideas and tried many tools including e-mail, Google Docs, Voicethread, wikis, and the Scratch upload site. On my end there were challenges related to us having many class periods off due to parent conferences, a conference I attended, and mid-winter break. We also had challenges with our district filter blocking our uploads to the Scratch site and not allowing the students to download email attachments from Gary’s students. 

    We ended up with a chart in Google Docs that linked the student teams, emails, and an individual Google Presentations for each game. Students used the slides in Google to share their ideas, drawings, and changes to the game. On our end we would download the games from Scratch and then e-mail them back to the students in Vietnam. But we spent wasted days not being able to access the games due to the filter and changed passwords. I think sometimes my students neglected to email their games back to the students in Vietnam. The end result is that in many groups Gary’s students did the lion’s share of the programming and had more buy-in than mine.

    Just because you build it, does not mean that they will collaborate. Gary and I had plans of a great cooperation, but we did not make it personal enough so students did not feel it. We originally planned to have the students make video introductions to each other. We scrapped this due to time restraints and my not having permission slips from students ahead of time.

    We surveyed both of our classes about the experience afterward and they (I use they to represent both Gary’s students and mine) expressed frustration about their partners abroad not working hard and the lack of communication. They also were frustrated by feeling that their ideas were not heard or deleted. Both of our classes experienced similar thoughts and we both had some students that worked harder than others. As Gary said it “felt more like us and them rather than a collaboration.” Middle school students need more than a Google Doc to communicate to develop a relationship with others.

    Gary and I learned a lot from this experience. Gary’s school uses Google Apps so his students were already comfortable with gmail and Google Docs. I underestimated how long it would take to get students started in these tools. His class was a semester long class and mine was only nine weeks.

    Remember it is ok to model failure to students. I am not afraid to “fail” at an idea especially if it is something new with great potential. The good news is that we are going to do it again next year. Things we will do different next year include:

    • both doing this project during a semester class for more time and make sure that there will not be a major break in our school schedules during the project.
    • teaching gmail, wikis, and Google Docs before the project
    • starting the collaboration sooner with introduction videos and google docs before we introduce Scratch to the students to build relationships
    • finding a better way to share our work perhaps with dropio or dropbox

    In the end the students did not really collaborate because they had no relationship with each other. We will work to fix this next year and hope for a more successful project based on better communication and real relationships. Hopefully this reflection will both encourage you to try a collaborative project and help you to plan it well.