Literacy Teaching

Online Collaboration – The Gift Culture

There are so many ways to collaborate online nowadays but what makes for effective online collaboration?

The NCSL wrote an evaluation/review of their online collaboration for Headteachers, 1000,00 Heads are Better than One and can teach us much. 

They found that online learning does not need new models of learning but that it refines existing models and that clarity about this enables us to determine the types of activities and purposes.

• the behaviourist persepective looks at task completion through a sequence of activities, usually with a focused set of objectives or competencies. (the what)
• the constructivist perspective looks at conceptual development by building understanding of broad principles. (the how)
• the culturalist perspective looks at developing relationships through collaborative problem solving. (and the why)

Whilst this is about online learning, I think that it also captures online collaboration although it is noted that the first two theories could be undertaken without any collaboration.

Things that I have learned whilst running several online collaborative projects are:

• just because it is built does not mean that people will use it
• it needs to be as simple as possible.  People don’t have much time to go online on top of their work.
• that online collaboration can be time limited – some projects stop once the task is completed, others continue.
• face to face demonstration of how to use the tools is best with films easily available to remind people of how to do things.
• clear purpose

Add comment March 25th, 2009

Images to support learning

There are many ways in which people have described or categorised the use of images to support learning and I want to see if my catogrisations for the use of images in literacy match with any others.

Becta’s description of the use of images in RE focuses around reflection and understanding and lists

• support for concept development as well as knowledge and understanding – a prompt to encourage research into all aspects of a topic
• stimulus to help pupils to identify feelings, emotions and mood, and to respond to these in appropriate ways
• a point of interest and focus to inspire discussion of a topic, enabling pupils to interact, respond appropriately and create their own responses
• a stimulus for writing to task and bearing an audience in mind, therefore enhancing creative and language skills
• support for individual, paired and small group work, and therefore fostering collaboration and the sharing of a learning experience between pupils while also developing their ICT skills
• a lead into follow-up tasks – researching and sourcing other images relevant to the religion, concept or theme being explored.

The links with literacy are met mostly through the first bullet point.

 The nrich site for maths discusses the use of images as being internal and external and here there are many links with literacy.  Both readers and writers use images.  Readers create them in their heads when reading and writers describe the images in their heads when writing (visualising).  In order to show children this, we have to externalise those images at first to show how to work with them and then children can use them internally.

Inspirations, the company that produces Kidspiration, the mind-mapping tool, categorises using images to:

• Make abstract ideas visible and concrete (making literary techniques visible)
• Connect prior knowledge and new concepts
• Provide structure for thinking, writing, discussing, analyzing, planning and reporting (sequencing and structuring)
• Focus thoughts and ideas, leading to understanding and interpretation (attention to intention)

This resonates very strongly with the categorisations for literacy.  We may use different language but mean the same things.  Our words are in brackets.

Add comment March 14th, 2009