My #edchat Experience. Overall Grade C+

Okay, so I just participated (or tried to) in my first twitter session with #edchat. The topic was "Is a blend of E-learning and face to face learning a viable option for reform?". For the whole transcript, look here.

To be totally honest, as a person that is looking in from the outside (or new), I would rate this experience as negative. As an analogy to this, I would liken myself to a confused student that has no sense of direction (self-directed learning anyone?).

Here's a list why:
- Very difficult to keep up with all of the tweets
- No consistency on topics talked about. It was just a smorgasbord of similar thoughts put into one place
- No focus. It was just multiple conversations between different people
- None of my tweets were responded too (probably got lost from all of the other tweets)
- Twitter is not a good platform to have conversations with multiple people
- Too many people

If your only reasons for following #edchat are to see what people are saying/reading/watching/doing, then it is an excellent source for information.With your hand up, how many people actually get a response with the #edchat hashtag?

But I did end up following @ShellTerrell @web20classroom

Here are some links (I couldn't catch them all since it was way too fast and I'm not going to go through the archive to find them all):
Schools Blend Virtual and Face-to-Face Teaching - http://bit.ly/aFG1KY
15 Back to School Apps for Teachers - http://bit.ly/cGL7v0
Funny Comic about eLearning - http://yfrog.com/mzu7xkj
School in a Pocket? - http://www.drdouggreen.com/2010/04/a-school-in-your-pocket-handhelds-go-to-school/

If my expectations are incorrect and there are certain ones I should be aware of, please let me know. I don't want to be misinterpreting what #edchat does.

Evaluating Groupwork

During a topic about group work in geography class, my instructor posed a question to us "How do you evaluate group work?". He pointed out that not a single teacher, in any department, will mark group work the same especially knowing that not all students learn the same way.

Is it fair to mark everyone the same on their final product, knowing some members may have contributed little? Or should you give each member a separate mark that takes into consideration their involvement (through observation or peer evaluation)?

The website here Assessing Student Learning with Groupwork addresses more of the pros/cons and it's uses in more detail.

In university I experienced both types of group evaluation. If you have a modified rubric/marking scheme which touches upon this please leave a message/comment.

wiki: an excellent source for sharing

As the title suggests, I was thinking about how a wiki is a great tool to share and modify information between classmates and the teacher. During university we had group work that used a wiki and it was great in that everyone could collect, modify and update information on an ongoing basis.

In terms of looking at wikis from a teacher's perspective, a wiki keeps timestamps and backups of when work is updated so you can easily tell how early or how much work a student has provided. It also keeps logs of who was the last to edit each page. The convenience of not forcing students to meet face-to-face and adding material when they are available is a huge bonus.

A wiki is not only suited for group work, but also for individual assignments. Instead of having students create a poster, why not have them create a wiki page on their topic? It puts all contributions into one easily accessible place.

There are other benefits to using wikis and the article here by Elgort, Smith and Toland further addresses what I've outlined.

I know there are probably a ton of teachers who incorporate wikis into their units. So if you have an example of a wiki that you did for a geography or science class could you direct me to your URL?

A wiki resource for educators: http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers

Thanks for reading my first post!