This week
I will be refining much of the insight I shared last week in the technology
enhanced change because I am actually not teaching this term.
My
reflections during step 4 focused on creating online library accounts and using
photo shop web sites to motivate students write first and then to improve the quality
of their writings. I already shared the following web links “http://www.my-diary.org” and “https://penzu.com/”
This week
I will be pushing the project a step further by adding extra materials and
thoughts to the subject matter and handling the writing issue from a more
challenging perspective namely research and paper writing. I assume that the
frequent and well scheduled practice and use of online libraries (for reading)
and diaries (for writing personal impressions on studied materials) will result
in an incomparable enthusiasm towards writing and in audacious attempts to express more complicated feelings and
ideas. Certainly the more confident students feel, the more engaged they get.
Well
written rubrics and clarified objectives together with consistent practice at this point will make students capable
of paraphrasing sentences and
expressing ideas using their own words. Having
achieved a reasonable level of mastery, students will not be confined to
writing personal paragraphs or short essays. They will be assigned harder and
more controversial topics to conduct research on, instead. At this level I will be providing a couple of instructive web
sites I came across as I was collecting relevant data for my project.
(http://www.questia.com) is, as they put
it “ a collection of academic journals which
offers thousands of articles from some of the world’s leading publishers.”
Easy to
browse and flexible as it is, ‘questia.com’ provides an entire collection of
books, academic journals, magazines and newspaper to search by category.
The first
step at this level is to pair up students or make groups of three at most, then
suggest varied areas for them to research
and carry out investigations into.
After
they made their choices, pairs or groups will be required to go through at
least two of the following procedures:
These rich resources with abundant information in various fields constitute
a solid base for the data collection phase. I expect a high degree of
competitiveness between groups at this
phase . At the next move, every member will be assigned a specific role while treating the collected data: sifting,
organizing then studying the information at hand. It’s worth noting that
individualization here does not and should not undermine the essence of
collaboration.
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