October 2000 — Features

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Creating a Pre-Service Teachers' Virtual Space

By Julie Reinhart, Tiffany Anderson and Joseph Slowinski

The fact that we were collaborating from a distance made the analysis phase even more critical. A clear understanding of everyone and everything involved helped to avoid misinterpretations and misunderstandings further down the road. Do not assume anything. Communication is critical for the success of a long distance collaborative project such as this one. We perceive this as modeling the process prior to implementation.

 

2. Designing Student Activities

Once we gathered the information above, we began to design the activity. The trick was to create an activity that would incorporate as much information as possible from the initial analysis. We knew that we wanted students to engage in small group discussions. Also, we learned in the analysis phase that each instructor wanted their students to read articles relating to the introduction of computers in classrooms. Therefore, we started the design process by looking deeper into the content of the readings. We clustered the articles into similar categories and came up with general topics for the five different clusters. The topics were enriched with the following focus questions:

· Equity — How can each student have equal access to technology to maximize his or her potential to learn?

 

· Acceptable Use — How can I protect each student and myself when I utilize technology in my classroom?

 

· Software Selection and Use — What do I need to consider?

· Technology Funding — How can I improve my instruction by obtaining more and better computer hardware and software?

 

· Integration of Technology into Teaching and Learning — How can teachers integrate technology into their instructional situation? More specifically, what are the critical factors that they need to consider, and why?

Next we looked for the most effective way to facilitate the discussion. We decided that we would have groups of three to four students with at least one student from each class. First, we provided the students with thought-provoking questions for each topic (see above). The goal was to have the students collaborate and write a position statement in response to each question. Second, we assigned the readings so that each member of the group would be responsible for one facet of the overall topic. Each read a different article related to the topic and provided their group with a summary. Through this process, each person would be an “expert” in one part of the overall issue.