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Tuesday 16 March 2010

Working collaboratively on our Digital Video

My group have tackled a number of problems whilst working on our Digital Movie.

First of all, the only member of our group with our video saved was not able to come into Uni (We should all have saved the video to prevent time from being wasted. This is a learning point!)

Secondly, the files would not convert on the computers. Eventually they did and we managed to complete our video.

Finally, the pen drive that the movie was saved onto stopped working and we lost our video!

We should have saved the video onto all of our pen drives and I think we will all learn this for the future!

There are times when people in groups get stressed out and that is part of working collaboratively. You need to all help each other and contribute equally to the group. The definition of collaborative working is "work[ing] jointly on an activity or project.” (Oxford Dictionary, 2006). This is not always the case and children definitely need practise at working in groups as:


“Children maybe work in groups in classrooms, but they seldom work as groups” (Richardson, undated) (cited in LTS, 2007).

Children need practise at working in groups to improve on their team work skills. However, putting students in groups, does not mean that co-operative learning is taking place as there are three basic ways that students can interact with each other:

they can compete to see who is "best"; they can work individualistically on their own toward a goal without paying attention to other students; or they can work cooperatively with a vested interest in each other's learning as well as their own (Johnson & Johnson, 2000)

There are times when children will use all of these types of interaction but it is important that they learn when to use each one effectively.

Research suggests that working co-operatively has many advantages to the other types of working:
  • Students LEARN more when they work cooperatively
  • Students are more POSITIVE about school, subject areas, and teachers
  • Students are POSITIVE about each other
  • Students are more effective INTERPERSONALLY (Johnson & Johnson, 2000)

This tells us just how effective working cooperatively can be and we should encourage children to this regularly.

Johnson & Johnson, 2000. Cooperative Learning- Two heads learn better than one.
Available at: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC18/Johnson.htm

LTS, (2007). Learning about Learning. Teaching for Effective Learning: How we learn
Available at:
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/Images/TEFL%20complete_tcm4435808.pdf

1 comment:

Collette said...

You have learned a lot from the process. Can I suggest that you look at some of the literature pertaining to cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is more than working on a project together. That said as a group you have overcome a number of challenges through working together.