Activity One for: Cooperation in the Classroom

Highlighting the ACTIVE in Active Learning for Middle School and High School Students

Goals:

· To provide students with a learning opportunity that emphasizes the utility of metacognition- thinking about one’s thinking as it applies to the role of active processing, active learning.

· To demonstrate the utility of concept maps coupled with voicethread technology for active learning in the electronic classroom

Objectives:

· Students will be introduced to concept maps as “visual organizers” for related information.

· Students will be introduced to voicethread technology that allows them to couple recorded audio messages/scripts with visual images.

Description:

· Student groups will construct a concept map for the term biological homeostasis. Each group will post their concept map on the voicethread website (www.voicethread.com) with an audio message. The message must describe their collective logic on how each of the nine items embedded in their concept maps is related to homeostasis.

· Student groups will compare their electronic postings. Each student group must identify the group that authored the concept map that has the most items in common with theirs and the group that authored the concept map that has the least amount of items in common with theirs.

· Students from the disparate groups will reform new student pairings, using one student from each group. Student pairs will exchange ideas on the concept(s) related to homeostasis.

· Student pairs will create a revised homeostasis concept map, which is published on an established open access wiki.

Assessment:

· Student pairs will monitor the electronic edits, revisions, comments, etc. to their posted concept map for a specified amount of time (1 week, 2 weeks, etc.)

· At the end of the monitoring period, each student pair will synthesize these electronic comments into an electronic message sent to the teacher/course instructor.