Recently I have started exploring a new resource called paper.li. It allows to publish a weekly newspaper with resources from the previous week on the topics of my choosing. It is amazing to see a such a great collection of article, lesson ideas, tips, and other information that will benefit my current and future classroom all together in one place. Make your own at paper.li and check out Mr. Hiebert’s Education Weekly at http://paper.li/e-1455153821.
Tag Archives: tech
Competition, Cooperation, and Collaboration: A Lesson Debrief
In reflection of my mini-lesson given on the topic of competition cooperation, and collaboration, it was extremely interesting to see how people related to the different terms I presented. It is striking to see that, yes indeed a significant amount of people have extraordinarily negative emotions connected to competition and some pretty idealistic association when it comes to cooperation and collaboration. This can be seen below.
In a debrief of the actual lesson, overall I thought it went extremely well. A lot of new ideas brought up, some of my assumptions confirmed, and a few debunked. Here are a few highlights for my to take forward into more exploration of my inquiry topic.
The fact one group gave up when the other group finished first. The helplessness when they lost was evident and I can see how people could feel this way when they lose. This was unplanned as they were supposed to finish the task but gave up, and provided insight into this phenomena.
- In discussion after the lesson with some colleagues, we talked about the prerequisites that competition requires to be successful. Sports really shows this in that there exists a non written “ethical code of sportsmanship” within each sports and it is really evident when players don’t abide by it. In cases like this, the player didn’t receive (or comprehend) this code in their education of the sport or competition in general.
- Additionally, few of my assumptions were confirmed. The Word Wall on Padlet showed that when people think about competition, their thirst are primarily negative. Words like hopelessness, disheartening, bullying, sabotage all were present and showed that people have had very negative experiences with competition in the past, an issue I think has to do with framing how competition should exists.
- Finally, it took longer to complete the task in a collaborative- competitive environment than in a teamwork-cooperation environment. This confirmed my suspicion that collaboration, while beneficial to an open sharing, trusting exchange of ideas, it is less effective for task completion. I think there are times when collaboration is appropriate and others where cooperation works better to complete the task.
Moving forward, I am excited to explore a few more of these ideas, particularly in relation to the link between competition and collaboration. It should prove interesting to see if we can find a way to connect these two seemingly exclusive concepts.
Competition and Technology: A Perfect Pair
It has been interesting in my observations of my current classroom, of the role that technology plays in promoting the competitive spirit in my students. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the technology used is essentially an extension of gameification, but simply extended to a different platform. Technology provides teachers an opportunity to bring their methods to align with the interests and learning styles of many modern learners. It also diversifies competition, as there exists a plethora of resources available to facilitate a broad range of competitive activities. Individual or self competition, peer vs. peer activities, or even activities that face the user against the “system” all exist in multitude through various forms of technology. Let’s explore a few forms of competitions facilitated or advanced by using technology.
Plickers
Plickers is a QR code based scanner app than give educators to give each student an inexpensive way of polling your classroom. Through this, teachers can use the cards to conduct multiple-choice style games with their students. This style of participation still allows for competition to exist in either a peer vs. peer activity or working to better personal bests.
Kahoot
Kaboot is another app that allows for in-class gameification using individual or team participation on a large class scale. With Kahoot, you can create quizzes that your student as can take using the app, with fastest correct answers getting the highest points. This direct peer vs. peer competition is both exciting and provides the kind of motivation that gameification can provide.
Student: https://kahoot.it/#/ Teacher: https://getkahoot.com/how-it-works
RAZ Kids
RAZ Kids is another web-based program where students can read, listen to, and take quizzes on books to work towards improving their English literacy. Additionally, through this reading, listening, and quiz taking, they gain stars or points that they can spend on updating or improving their personalized avatar for their account. By pricing this incentive of reward, the students are competing against the system of the program itself to get high scores on the quizzes to gain more stars. This type of program can also be modified, as I have done in the past, to reflect a style of “reading race” with classes, grades or student competing against each other to read that most books. Using a program like RAZ Kids allows students to participate at school, at home, or wherever they may be as the whole programs library of books is available online.
These example show how technology is a powerful tool to use to assist educators in promoting positive competitive spirit in their classrooms p, as well as making these competitions relative and accessible to today’s learners.