Team Collaboration. Wiki Style.

Today representatives from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) visited our school to videotape our team's (Garry, Mike, and Curtis) collaboration meeting with the school's media and technology facilitators(Gina and Julia respectively). I felt that the meeting went exceptionally well.

This was our second collaboration meeting relating to our interdisciplinary unit on "Change". Before getting into the details of today's meeting, here is a little history on how the unit had developed up to this point. In October we were charged with the task of deciding on the theme of a collaborative unit that we would develop and implement as a team. This was the only required piece going into the first meeting. The key to selecting the them was deciding on a time frame in which the unit would be implemented. We decided to "kick-off" the unit early in the third quarter. (Late January) Garry shared that he would normally cover the civil war during that time period in his Social Studies class and his Science class would cover evolution. These both lent themselves well to the theme of "Change". The Math curriculum pacing guide (provided by our district) indicated that I would be covering linear equations early in the third quarter. It was only a small leap to tie in slope or "rate of change". Our theme was born. We selected "Change". Mike hit the ground running. He instantly tackled the theme with a contagious excitement. We met with Gina and Julia late in October to brainstorm lesson ideas that matched our curriculum with the theme. We came up with several tentative ideas at that time. Here a few of the key ideas:

Teach slope/rate of change (Math - Curtis)

Cost of Civil War -- Twist Notebook [Electronic Scrapbook Activity] (Social Studies - Garry)

Point of View journal entries related to Civil War (Social Studies - Garry)

Walt Whitman poetry -- Change reflected in art (Language Arts - Mike)

Red Badge of Courage novel (Language Arts - Mike)

Seminar [topic to be determined later] (Language Arts - Mike)

The first meeting began rather awkwardly. With the mandated interdisciplinary unit collaboration meeting, we were unsure what we were supposed to bring to the table. After the initial awkwardness, we plodded through and gained at least enough ideas to get us thinking about and preparing for the unit. Shortly after our first meeting, Gina created a wikispaces page that permitted everyone to collaborate online. This really improved our preparation for today's meeting.

It only makes sense to direct you at this point to the wiki so that you can see how the collaboration developed from random ideas to carefully selected activities. Please keep in mind that the wiki is a work in progress. I would like to acknowledge Scott Elias. I plugged his presentation

View Upload your own

when it was suggested that one of the student products for Social Studies would be created using Powerpoint or Photostory 3. It occured to me that students might benefit from these pointers before creating presentations.

Excellent resource by Scott Elias on presenting.

Scott Elias' "Presentation on Presenting" provides excellent advice to teachers who find themselves struggling to keep students engaged with their slide presentations. The presentation provides excellent concrete guidelines and clear strategies to avoid the pitfalls of Powerpoint.

My school purchased data projectors for almost every classroom in the school this year. The 8th grade Math teachers have worked together to create powerpoint presentations to replace the normal notetaking practice. Regretably we have committed many of the faux pas that Scott wards against. I suspect that I will revisit his document many times in the coming weeks in an effort to clean up some bad presentation habits. It has been very defeating to spend hours creating presentations that my students insist on sleeping through. Thank you for the excellent post Scott.

As an aside, I think that I will post a before and after presentation once I've implemented Scott's recommended strategies.

Got started with a couple of my NCETC inspired initiatives today.

I created a wikispaces wiki page today. The URL is http://WMSMath.wikispaces.com. I chose to create a protected wiki since the purpose of the wiki is to provide a centralized location for Walkertown Middle School math teachers to share resources and collaborate. I may even need to part with a little cash and establish it as a private wiki. I'm a little concerned with posting some of the items that we've included in our powerpoint presentations this year. Some of our examples were copied directly from our textbook software. In the meantime, I think we will simply replace the copied examples with original creations.

The other project that I've begun working on is the video to teach slope. As I've stated in an earlier post, I was very impressed with Lee Lefever's "Wikis in Plain English" video that David Warlick showed in his presentation "The Art And Technique Of Wikis" at NCETC on November 28, 2007. I've decided to do my slope video using powerpoint. I've started developing some ideas and implementing the animations. It's going to be a lot of work, but I am hoping to have a quality finished product when I'm done. I will put a copy of what I've accomplished periodically on the new wiki page so that everyone can see the progress.