Magic in Making Do: Collaborating close by
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| “Nothing up my sleeve! And..presto!” |
I thought there could be nothing more magical for my students than real-time video chats with real live teenagers in Spain and Argentina. School schedules and time zones actually create more distance than geography these days, however, so sometimes we have to make do.
Maybe it’s with an elementary school down the road. Maybe it’s just between the class that meets before lunch and the class that meets after after. I mean, first and third period is not exactly a Meeting of Two Worlds type experience.
But what to do the rest of the week?
Amigo E-mails
I’ve not had great luck with contracts in the past, mostly because things change. Things come up that neither the kiddos nor I would have thought of because they’re blazing new trails, for goodness’ sake. SO the mixed groups are kind of a blessing in that in order to progress, group members constantly HAVE to update each other to move forward. So they have to acknowledge each other’s progress, apprise their compadres of their own progress and future plans, and make any requests in writing.
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| “linking rings” from johnny_automatic on openclipart.org |
After trying a “just e-mail everyone and CC me” approach, I decided to create one email for all to respond to. If I were starting over, I’d send it with the instructions, but as it is, I took all of the CC’ed emails, pasted them in one email, and did the highlighting trick I picked up from Colleen (spelling, form, wrong word) to send them all under a uniform subject line with all group members’ names I could find easily in my inbox–just be sure everyone hits REPLY ALL!
I’m also having each group submit one product a day each period. They decided their products early in the process, and made sure they had at least one interpersonal product, one presentational speaking product, and one presentational writing product (and maybe an interpretive product if the task required). Now, I made a Google Classroom assignment for the first product, but then a confused kiddo had a random idea that seemed even better: attach the product to the update e-mail! Maximum sharing!
