Social Learning Online

Today I want to focus on tools that can be used for social learning between students within a class. What I am not going to do is discuss all of the different ways students can learn from other students around the country or around the world. I am going to focus how students in a class can use social online tools to enhance their learning. The easiest way for me to do this is to paint the picture of a learning situation from both the teacher’s and the student’s perspective.

I often come across videos, applets, math comics (or nerd comics like Dilbert), and other resources that don’t find a place in my class lesson due to time or because I already used something similar in class. I could put links to all of these goodies on a bookmarking site such as blinklist.com or delicious.com. My students could then go to this site to find links to additional resources that will help them if they are struggle or if they want to see a problem done in a different way. I could also require my students to post links, perhaps 1 per month or 1 every two weeks to sites they found that pertain to a class topic.

With everything posted on the bookmarking site, I would expect my students to visit the site often. To monitor their visits I could create a course management system (CMS) that students would have to access periodically and comment on these additional resources. For a CMS I could use moodle.com or I could create a wiki and have a page for each student where they could post their comments after visiting the bookmarking site.

Here finally is where the social learning comes in. On the wiki I could create group pages and in those group pages students could share which resources they like, which resources they didn’t like, and any issues they are having with the topic. Using the CMS and the bookmarking site together I can create an environment where students are looking at resources at home, searching for new resources, discussing resources with fellow students, and discussing difficulties and successes within each topic.

Independently of the previous example, I am a huge fan of strategies/puzzle/logic games. Games that engage students in thinking through a problem inherently help students with their math skills. There are probably hundreds of these games online and all very in their difficulty and the actual amount of strategy involved. One game that has a fair amount of strategy but also using social learning is a game at girlsinc.org/teamup. It is a game made for girls so male students will have to get over it, but what ii does is it has you go through levels with different characters that each have different abilities. You can play the game by yourself but it works very well if you have a different person control each character. Then the team of students needs to discuss what they need to do to finish each level. As a teacher you can also restrict conversation to increase the challenge. Perhaps students are only allowed to say what their player should do and are not allowed to tell other players what to do. This would increase the level of difficulty and would increase the amount of focus from each group member.

So there you go, two different ideas to use in class for social networking while still focusing on instruction.