In the classroom collaborative work, follows different activities to develop and foster in the students the following skills: a) leadership; b) self-assessment; c) respect for the opinions of his colleagues; d) production capacity; e) persuasiveness and negotiation, and finally f) working group capacity.

After introducing the topic to be explored by sciencestudents watched a short video and answer individually to a quiz. 

 

High Level activity: “CreatiV3”

Students stared to research about science poetry and then they distributed these poems among them. After that short videos were produced while which student of the class was reciting poems with a background soundtrack created and played by a colleague using a classic guitar. All these videos were joined together creating a single film by using the movie maker entitled by the class “CreatiV3” (see photo below). This movie was presented to the school community during our “Open Week” (a period of time dedicated to the exhibition  of project works, debates, poetry declamation, contests and many other extracurricular activities that takes place before Easter Holiday). As we learned in module 1: What is collaborating learning? In this collaborative activity “CreatiV3” students enhanced: openness to diversity; developed a sense of respect among each other as well as team work and leadership competence; listening and presentation skills. Even though they have worked together not as a small group but as a class group they managed to tackle the problems to reach the common goal – that art can be found not only in museums, art galleries, libraries, research articles, textbooks but also in science. 

With the constant use of information and communication technologies in our daily lives, it is natural that the computer has become an indispensable tool for our day living. In this context the school can not be apart of this new technological reality, having to adapt and relate what it is learned in school with what actually happens in the life of every citizen. So we can say that this will be an important tool for collaborative learning, as this is defined as a methodology learning, in which, through group work and the exchange of knowledge among peers, the people involved in the process learn together, and, being the "language" shared by students, it is natural to feel comfortable and natural to use it as main job feature. With the integration of new communication information technology in schools, installing computer labs; interactive whiteboards, it is clear that the use of these resources in the educational process will enrich for better learning, provide greater ease in performing any activity and promote interest in students in every subject. However, despite the preference that students give to these resources, they are not always available in schools, a reality that is no obstacle to the development of collaborative learning. It occurs because the most important in collaborative learning is the development of tasks that can provide the following skills: the students must be able to negotiate, to be able to solve conflicts, be able to decide and to reach consensus on what is the discussion of ideas of the group members and be able to integrate their ideas consistently in the whole work.

Questions:

Are they working together?

Do they share responsibility?

Do they make substantive decisions?

Is their work interdependent?

Let’s check the path teachers and pupils need to constantly develop when employing the 4 collaboration queries:

-          The decisions made should be pinpointed to the content rather than on the format. 

-          The pupils must share and find together what type of activity they want to work by discussing an issue; solve a problem or create a product. 

-          They also can work face to face (that is what happens in the majority of times), using technology or even with people outside school. 

-          Share responsibility occurs when they collaboratively work.

-          Own the work means to collectively own the work and be responsible for the outcome.

-          It helps when teachers selecte one of the following tasks for the students: Content – Process – Product. Making substantive decisions together helps to drop the levels of anxiety.

 

Therefore the four questions are a perfect way to evaluate whether there was collaborative work or not. If the teacher positively rates, each question may have confirmation that this occurred. In classes where this methodology was chosen, similar questions were designed and placed to a better choice of tasks to be presented to students.

They also allow us to have an accurate view of all the collaborative work done by students, step by step, and at the same time, monitoring and make an accurate assessment of the process.

The collaborative scenarios presented and the template, are quite interesting and inspiring. It will be a tool to use in the future!

After introducing the topic to be explored by sciencestudents they first watched a short video and answered individually to a quiz. 

Collaboration: decisions steps – 1 (Students are required to work in pairs or groups?); 

Knowledge construction: decisions steps – 2 (Main requirement is knowledge construction?); Real-world problem-solving and innovation: decisions steps -1 (Main requirement is problem solving?); 

use of ICT for learning: decisions steps – 2 (ICT supports students’ knowledge construction?);

Self-regulation: decisions steps – 1 (Long-term activity AND students have learning goals and success criteria in advance?); 

and Skilled communication: decisions steps – 1 (Students are NOT required to produce extended or multi-modal communication).

High Level activity: “CreatiV3”

 Students stared to research about environmental science poetry and then they distributed these poems among them. After that short videos were produced while which student of the class was reciting poems with a background soundtrack created and played by a colleague using a classic guitar. All these videos were joined together creating a single film by using the movie maker entitled by the class “CreatiV3”. This movie was presented to the school community during our “Open Week” (a period of time dedicated to the exhibition  of project works, debates, poetry declamation, contests and many other extracurricular activities that takes place before Easter Holiday). As we learned in module 1: What is collaborating learning? In this collaborative activity “CreatiV3” students enhanced: openness to diversity; developed a sense of respect among each other as well as team work and leadership competence; listening and presentation skills.  Even though they have worked together not as a small group but as a class group they managed to tackle the problems to reach the common goal – that art can be found not only in museums, art galleries, libraries, research articles, textbooks but also in science. 

 

Collaboration: decisions steps – 5 

 Students have shared responsibility, make substantive decisions together and work interdependent in all process by researching and selecting the environmental poems, deciding how to organize short videos into a single film and presenting the final result to school community. 

Knowledge construction: decisions steps – 5

This learning activity requires knowledge construction about environmental poetry, ICT (by creating a film using movie maker), requires apply knowledge in a new context (e.g. associating poetry to science, learning to recite, writing for the school journal), and results have learning goals in more than one subject (e.g. Portuguese, Science, IT, Music, Art).

The learning activity’s main requirement was problem-solving in the context of the Environmental Sciences and the problem was a real-world problem that aim to raise awareness in the school community and students did innovate (e.g. Logo creation for the poetry program incorporating the name of the class CV3 - CreatiV3, creation of the soundtrack and news for the school journal). They implemented their ideas in the real world they organized to the school community a "Tertulia Ambiental” – “Environmental literary gathering” in order to promote the interaction between generations. The “Tertulia” comprises a musical session, magic show, poetry recital and the viewing of the created film “CreatiV3” followed by snacks.

Students used ICT to support knowledge construction and the ICT was required for constructing this knowledge and students did create an ICT product for authentic users – Film entitled Creativ3 and invitation and brochure to the "Tertulia Ambiental” – “Environmental literary gathering.” Writing a news for the school journal entitled “CreatiV3: We no longer want mobile phones used in vain.” 

The learning activity was a long-term (durations two semesters) and students had learned goals and associated success criteria in advance of completing their work (e.g. weekly they write down their thoughts about the progress of the work, they shared in the classroom their thoughts about environmental problems implied in the poems). Students had the opportunity to plan their own work with different teachers applying different subjects. Students had the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback. They collectively owned the work so feedback happen daily face to face.  

Students design their communication for a particular audience – the school community. 

 

We enjoy working together and learn collaboratively! 

 a) It is a student-centered process; 

b) Promotes students Involvement in the assessment tasks; 

c) Promotes students responsibility and motivation towards the learning process; 

d) Promotes self-reflection and students argumentation; 

e) Students can learn socially from each other; 

f) Literacy through digital promotes the use of digital web 2.0 applications and 

g) Promotes development of 21st century skills and competences;

This type of activity promotes the acquisition of all those skills.

The challenges we face in the classroom are at all similar to Antonio: 

a) Changing role of the teacher / students in the classroom; 

b) Group dynamics: students must have the attitude and receptivity towards positive Their Involvement in the assessment;

c) Group assessment versus individual assessment; 

d) Management of teams / groups of students so everyone que participates and collaborates in the activities and 

e) Time available to prepare and apply assessment of collaboration in the classroom, the latter being the most difficult to achieve because it involves different variables in most of the time, are almost impossible to combine.

Although we agree with the benefits and challenges provided our classrooms are not yet equipped to carried them out. We have constrains in the facilities but we have constant and regular communication between peers (face to face or networking).

The solution based on random choice presented by Anna is quite interesting. The proposed tools for the process (http://www.classtools.net/random-name-picker/64_42Jcc2; http://www.miniwebtool.com/random-name-picker/) appear to be very stimulating and appealing throughout the process, although we have not yet used them for the same purpose. 

Finally, we share the same doubts raised by Anna at the end of her presentation. “Students as well as their parents usually take summative assessment more seriously than formative assessment. 

How can we teachers persuade students that assessing for learning can be more relevant than assessment of learning? 

How can we plan assessment for learning as an ongoing process without stopping the spontaneous flowing of ideas and creativity while students are collaborating?” (Anna).

This type of work revealed to be quite interesting and provided effective assessment of results, since the students’ performance/outcomes/practices were effective.

Regarding the evaluation, if all the members of the group performed similarly tasks, shared the same goals and define steps to make them overcame obstacles evaluation should be of the group without privileged an individual component.

 

2. Our uncertainties concerns assessment (e.g. types and instruments). How to implement Solo Taxonomy and Anderson’s Taxonomy without creating a sense of (in)security and (in)parity both teachers and students? If we do not follow the taxonomy what rubric should we follow to construct the instruments? 

As for this ‘co-teaching rotation’ collaboration model it seems to us, as it seemed to Valentina Marinova, that can originate some problems when designing and coordinating the works. Once again the key note endured that it is important to motivate teachers to be open to change, to adapt to new technologies and to work according to this model. Perhaps a way to do it may be the diffusion of the results of experiments of this model in other school. It looks as if motivating students has been easier.

However, as mentioned, this type of work cannot always be done, but rather it will be exceptional, because although many teachers like to work collaboratively in the implementation of projects of this kind, it is not always possible to take into account. We sometimes are overloaded with different tasks in schools (e.g. designing lesson planes, preparation of instruments to apply in the class and bureaucracy) this prevent us from doing this kind of work as often as we would like.

One experience in which some of us have participated in the collaborative work involved math’s teachers from all over Portugal. Some of tools that we privileged were Skype and Messenger. At this informal meetings we discussed the tasks and what strategies to be used and then applied the same rubrics to all classes. Later we discussed the different reactions, results, difficulties ... in this aspect the technologies were fundamental, because they suppressed a constraint, the distance.

It is interesting to note that in addition to the collaboration between teachers in the same area, there is also a call for articulation between disciplinary areas, which makes the work and the tasks to be applied in the classroom much richer.

This will be the ultimate goal in terms of collaborative work, to enable teachers at a school to jointly develop tasks by articulating knowledge and developing in students a taste for this type of work.

But we all agree that if teachers can work collaboratively, that will be an asset to students and will be an inspiration.

Achieving successful learning outcomes will be the key to changing mindsets and making collaborative learning a current practice.

With this MOOC we have discovered an important tool – “Edmodo”, which we are already experimenting to make and share documents.