Thursday, April 30, 2015

Making a group work significant.

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According to what I read in the articles “Maximizing the Benefits of Project Work in Foreign Language Classrooms” and “Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning” I can say that working in groups can be meaningful for students; however, the educator has to do this work meaningful by applying the group work correct in order to reach that goal I would like to quote something from the reading, Lamer and Mergendoller stated that “A project is meaningful if it fulfills two criteria. First, students must perceive the work as personally meaningful, as a task that matters and that they want to do well. Second, a meaningful project fulfills an educational purpose. Well-designed and well-implemented project-based learning is meaningful in both ways” (p. 1). As we can see creating a significant group work is not that easy; first, students need to be somehow motivated to feel this work like a personally meaningful task. Second, there must be a purpose on that work because we cannot have students doing work group without any sense. A good example of a meaningful work group will be:
Work group: students need to form groups of 5 students (they can work with whoever they want), they will research about the most important news around the world in the last month (students will be free to choose the kind of news that they will be looking). Then, students will have to work in groups and write the new that they like the most in past tense. After that, students have to send the new to my email. Teacher will send feedback with comments and corrections after revising the homework.

I think that this will be a good work group because students are free to choose what they like so their opinion counts; second, they can choose the people that they will be working on it in order to be comfortable; also, students will cooperate with each other and choose the new that the like the most on order to write it in past tense. In this homework students will be using technology to look for the most recent news (innovation will be applied). At the end, students will get their feedback to realize their mistakes and correct them so they will be getting a significant learning through cooperation and the application of technology.

1 comment:

  1. hello Tomas! i decided to comment your post because I like your question. As you said it's useful to create group work for students and teachers as well. Because in way teachers give students the opportunity to involve more in the topic and give them the change to notice their weakness but himself .however as the articles and you mentioned as well,we have to be very careful and create activities which has objective and goals. Because teachers are the guides for students and they need a control to avoid waste time instead of learning time.

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