DAY FIVE - Collaboration > Competition

  Quick Notes: 

- Itty Bitty can create private websites that don't need a host server. 

- Lorem Ipsum is a fake language that can be used as a place-holder when designing web pages. 

- Bit shorteners (ex: TinyURL) can take an extremely long URLs and condense them. 

- 8 or less digits of binary = 'Bit'

- 8+ digits of binary = 'Bite'

Today's Reflection:

 - How can we teach kids to collaborate instead of always competing?

I've noticed many times during my practicums that students get extremely competitive with one another, sometimes to the point where an activity can get completely derailed. For example, for one of the summative assessments for my unit about Ancient Greece, I asked students to create Jeopardy clues that would eventually be built into a game. For our practice round, I did not tell the students that the clues they would be creating would be used for a game with their classmates in the opposing cohort. When the students thought they would be the ones answering their own questions, they wrote the questions in about 10 minutes and made them as easy as possible. After the first round of gameplay, I told students that the 2nd round of questions they would be creating would be used in a game for their classmates. Once they found this out, students spent 40 minutes writing their questions and made them as difficult as possible. After the 2nd game, the overall scores were much lower and students began arguing about points, missed questions, timer errors, dead questions, and the legitimacy of the clues. It got so heated that I had to eventually stop the game because a couple students were getting so frustrated. This was an extremely important learning opportunity for me because I realized that competition in the classroom can sometimes lead to a very negative experience for students and teachers. It also does not allow room for cooperation and collaboration, two extremely important life skills. 

Since this was right at the end of my last Field Experience, I did not have a chance to reflect and pivot my approach to the Jeopardy game, but it is definitely something that I will keep in mind going forward. Thinking about it now, what I should have done instead is have the students create the questions and have them work in pairs or small groups to answer the questions together. Though COVID has made social interaction and collaboration very challenging this year, it is definitely something that I want to keep learning about and improving over my career.