Designing an Online Collaborative Lesson
Integrating the elements of TPACK into a collaborative lesson in literature for seventh-grade students might seem rather hard. However, by using efficient techniques, one can achieve impressive results. The topic of the sixty-minute lesson in question being the specifics of Poe’s poetry, it will be relatively easy to thrill the students into paying attention.
The goal of the collaborative lesson will be to teach the students poetry analysis in general and the approaches to analyze Poe’s poems in particular. The major objective of the lesson will be to teach the students use their iPads applications for studying purposes. Therefore, in the course of the lesson, such materials as iPads, course books and PowerPoint lecture slides are going to be used.
The use of TPACK is vital for the efficiency of the given lesson. The technological knowledge is represented in the given case by the ability to use iPad applications for studying purposes. While students use iPads on a regular basis for entertainment, it is necessary to teach them to use these devices, as well as other technological advances, for their academic performance.
The elements of pedagogical knowledge can be traced in the way in which different teaching strategies are applied in the course of the lesson. For different types of activities, different strategies are going to be utilized (i.e., cooperative learning for group tasks, classroom experiments for individual tasks and assessments for the evaluation of the test results).
In its turn, the content knowledge (Dehnavi, Sarafi & Nematbakhsh, 2011) will be demonstrated by the way in which the students will apply their newly acquired skills of poetry analysis in their individual and group assignments.
E-Learning Case Studies
An Offensive Comment
Whenever a discussion is started, conflicts are unavoidable (Hageman & Stoope, 2012). Therefore, it is required that the students should learn to handle these conflicts instead of denying their existence.
With that being said, it will be necessary to convince the “offended party” that a comment should not be taken personally; instead, it should be viewed as just another person’s opinion, which may or may not be true and only reflects the given person’s broad or, on the contrary, shallow vision of the world.
The Lesson That Bridges Nations
One of the greatest problems of collaborative lessons concerns the challenges related to organizing the cooperation of all participants involved (Callahan, 2004). The distance and the difference in students’ schedules manifests itself especially clearly when collaborative classes are carried out among the students living in different states.
However, there is a way to solve the problem. After figuring out the schedule of each student, one will have to use the days when each student is free as the possible time for classes and let the students agree on time.
Comments Theft
Unfortunately, the instances of stealing the others’ comments and posting them as one’s own ideas are practically inevitable in collaborative lessons. Triggered by a number of factors, starting with the lack of ideas and the unwillingness to think on one’s own to the mere lack of time and, therefore, the attempt to pass the course somehow, the given phenomenon is rather widespread.
Plagiarism searching devices are a possible yet inefficient ay out; showing the lack of trust (Vicinus & Eisner, 2009) and teachers’ own laziness, the given method is not an efficient measure. Instead, it will be necessary to get across the idea that even an attempt at individual thinking and an original thought will count as a valuable effort.
Reference List
Callahan, C. M. (2004). Program evaluation in gifted education. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Dehnavi, M. N., Sarafi, S. M. & Nematbakhsh, N. (2011). Developing an e-learning model for tracking the continuous attendance of the students. Journal of theoretical and Applied Technology, 24(6), 62–68.
Hageman, B. & Stoope, S. (2012). Conflict management. T+D, 66(7), 58–61, 68.
Vicinus, M. & Eisner, C. (2009). Originality, imitation and plagiarism: teaching writing in the digital age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.