Enriching my prototype

Hello everyone!!!!

Last week, I shared with you my prototype of the educational project I created. Today, I want to show you more about it. I have been thinking about enriching my educational project by making it more social, introducing different cooperative work.

First of all, I want to explain to you what collaborative work is. Learning and cooperative work is an approach that seeks to organize activities within and outside the classroom to become a social and academic learning experience. Students work in groups to perform tasks collectively.
Learning in this approach depends on the exchange of information among students, who are motivated both to achieve their own learning and to enhance the achievements of others.

Through collaborative work, students can share strengths and weaknesses with their groups and help each other, Besides, they will also develop many interpersonal skills to interact and communicate with others.

If you want to investigate more about this approach you can have a look at these links I leave you embedded:

1.Concept of collaborative work

2.Collaborative work in depth

3.Steps for collaborative work 

For these reasons, I decided to turn my educational project into a collaborative one.

How have I done it?

I was researching about collaborative work and I found three collaborative movements:

- Collaboration within the classroom through cooperative learning.

- Collaboration out of the classroom connecting with other classes or communities and share opinions, to make service- learning projects, etc.

- Collaboration back to the classroom, taking into account external agents in order to provide a meaningful and real learning.

I have made some changes in the prototype I shared with you last day. If you remember, in my prototype I included collaborative work inside the classroom but as I want to make it richer, I have taken into account collaborative work outside the classroom and then, bringing back the external ideas to the classroom for the final outcome. The protoype process was the following:

1. Collaboration inside the classroom: looking for information in groups, about a certain topic, in which each student will have a different role.

2. Final outcome: creating a presentation with the information they have looked for.

I will keep collaboration within the classroom the same way I explained in my prototype, keeping roles within the students´ groups, but with a different purpose. The final outcome will be a genial.ly presentation too, but I will include another challenge before the final outcome in order to involve collaboration out of the classroom.

In this new challenge, social networks will be part of the project. Students will be able to spread their ideas through the classroom blog. The process I want to carry out now is:

1. Collaboration inside the classroom: looking for information about a certain topic, in groups, in which each student will have a different role.

2. Collaboration outside the classroom: students will have to write their conclusions of what they have learnt through the previous process, in a learning diary in the classroom blog. The teacher will help students to share their learning diaries with other schools or classrooms in order to receive feedback from other students.

3. Collaboration back to the classroom: once students have shared their ideas, they will have to reflect about the feedback given in order to include some of the aspects they have learnt from the other students. Each group will have to create a genial.ly presentation in which they include the information they have concluded, and some aspects they have learnt with this educational project.

It is a great idea, that students can share their knowledge among others. By this way, students learn from a meaningful context and thier interests arise.

Here I leave you a flyer explaining briefly how I have enriched my educational project.

Created with Smore

Here I share with you a mindmap for you to take into account when creating your own collaborative project from your lesson plan!

Created with Easel.ly

As in every post, I want to share with you a final reflection to conclude, in order to reflect what I have learnt.

Self- reflection

For carrying out this post, I had to research about what collaborative work is, and to know some of the main collaborative movements in order to see which one fits better in my educational project. Finally, I decided to include the three movements I have already shown you, because by this way, with this educational project, students will learn a lot and they will realize that learning is not an own task, but we can learn from and with others.
The tools I have used are:
- Smore for creating the flyer through which I have presented the changes made in my educational project in order to turn it into a collaborative work. For doing that, you can also use other easy applications, that I used for other posts, such as: Canva to create images and flyers, Pixton in order to create comics for your students, or even your students can create them for the rest of the class!, another tool for creating comics is Storyboard That.

- Easel.ly for creating the mindmap highlighting the three main aspects we must take into account for making a collaborative project.
All of them are very easy to use and very interesting for enriching your works, you just have to log in and start working!

Besides learning about new tools and applications I had never heard about, I have learnt many things about cooperative learning. I realized how much I like this type of learning since I think it is very interesting for our students, moreover, it has many advantages that maybe we had never thought. It makes students to be motivated with the topic they are going to study and a positive attitude is going to be developed. Cooperative learning also helps students to develop interpersonal skills, to respect each other, to develop problem solving skills and to be resposible with their own work.
In addition, for me, carrying out this challenge of turning my prototype into a collaborative project has been very useful because I see that there are many fun ways of learning, not only for the students but for us, as teachers, for example taking part of other collaborative projects, that many other teachers share with the world.
Having said that, the next step I will take is to fit in another collaborative project from other people. I would like to be part of a learning circle on the net with people from all around the planet. I invite you to do the same because it will open your mind and see the world through another perspective.

See you soon with the next post!!!