{"id":412,"date":"2007-09-13T22:13:46","date_gmt":"2007-09-14T03:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/09\/13\/predicted-failure\/"},"modified":"2007-09-13T22:26:57","modified_gmt":"2007-09-14T03:26:57","slug":"predicted-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/09\/13\/predicted-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"When A Group Is One"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new ISTE standards for students<\/a> focus on things like creativity, innovation, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making.\u00a0 I have made changes to my courses that reflect these new standards.\u00a0 My undergraduate tech integration course completed the first\u00a0activity today in a series I have planned to assess some of the skills\u00a0defined in the new ISTE standards.<\/p>\n

Today was a “group” project.\u00a0 The activity was fairly simple.\u00a0 Using Word, create a table with five columns and six rows.\u00a0 Insert 30 pictures (I had already taken a picture of each student and posted them in our content management system), one in each cell of the table.\u00a0 To make the photos all fit on one page the directions\u00a0specified that\u00a0each photo to be one inch tall and 0.75 inches wide. The pictures were all four inches tall and six inches wide.\u00a0 The shape of the picture required resizing and\u00a0cropping of the edges, similar to what I have shown below.<\/p>\n

\"algorecropped.png\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is the hard part; the students had to put it all together before the end of class.\u00a0 With 30 pictures each requiring a lot of formatting, it would be difficult for one person to finish the activity in the limited amount of time.<\/p>\n

I divided the students into five groups of six.\u00a0 I explained that this\u00a0was a group project.\u00a0 The group could complete the project in any way they saw fit and that all members of the group would receive the same grade.\u00a0 That was the end of my direction.<\/p>\n

I hoped each group would divide the pictures and each take a row of the table.\u00a0\u00a0Each person would only have to do\u00a0five pictures.\u00a0 They could then share their work with each other and copy\/paste the rows into a master document.\u00a0 I wondered how they would name and organize their files so they could be exchanged without confusion.\u00a0 I require them to have USB flash drives so I anticipated those being shuffled around.<\/p>\n

Originally I was going to give them more direction.\u00a0 I was going to say “each person format five pictures and then share those with your group,” but I changed my mind because I wanted to see their problem-solving, collaboration and communication skills in action.\u00a0 After thinking it over, I predicted each person would try to format all the pictures\u00a0while the “leaders” of the groups would make sure each\u00a0member understood how to do the formatting.<\/p>\n

I was right.\u00a0 The students with experience in formatting pictures went around the group making sure each member could do all the steps.\u00a0 That was the end of the collaboration.<\/p>\n

Less than 10% of the students were able to come close to finishing the whole activity.\u00a0 Most of the class had\u00a0fifteen to twenty\u00a0of the pictures in place when the class ended.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These are bright students with a lot of technical skills.\u00a0 Most of them graduated from high school just a few months ago, so they have been around computers their whole lives.<\/p>\n

How do high schools prepare our students to work together and solve problems?\u00a0 We need to rethink things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new ISTE standards for students focus on things like creativity, innovation, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making.\u00a0 I have made changes to my courses that reflect these new standards.\u00a0 My undergraduate tech integration course completed the first\u00a0activity today … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[336,340,2],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","tag-edtech","tag-education","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}