Cindy

Critique Feedback from Don Baxter Team Activities & Peer Partnership This is a activity academically orientated because this requires the students to work in a group setting. This will help the students to reflect on this assignment.

This is content focused. It helps them acquire good writing skills. This also requires the students to read what is entered by each student in the Wiki. This is the best method of communication to make sure each student reads the Wiki nand provides there own feedback to each discussion. According to Conrad and Donaldson "Team projects should require all members to be active in the development and decision-making process and to be individually accountable for their contributions. This can be accomplished through the team member evaluations discussed in Chapter three" (2004). Are you teaching reading classes at Saddleback College? If so, what is your course number?

Cindy Reading, Team Activities

Task: Group writing assignment (narrative paragraph) Objective: To practice using different concluding sentence styles in a paragraph Author: Cindy Reading Method: Asynchronous I have set up a wiki with five different topics (a memorable experience with a historical event, an experience with culture shock, a most embarrassing moment, a daring moment, and a scary experience). You may select whichever topic you like, but each group may have no more than five members, and once a group is full, you must select another group. Additionally, you may not switch groups in the middle of this assignment. Select a group/topic, and post a sentence or two about your story by midnight on Wednesday night. Once everybody in your group has suggested a story, discuss and decide which story your group will work with.
 * Progressive Paragraph**
 * Instructions**

As a group, write one paragraph telling the story of your selected experience. You may have the person who experienced the story draft it in first person so that you have all of the details, but you should all participate in editing the paragraph for grammar and style. As a group, divvy up the different types of conclusion sentences we have learned about. Each member of your group should write one style of conclusion sentence. Then, as a group, decide which conclusion sentence you will use for your final paragraph. At the top of your group’s wiki page, post the final paragraph including the selected conclusion sentence, and include a list of your other conclusion sentences underneath. Post your final paragraph by midnight on Sunday night.

Each member of your group will be graded equally on the grammatical and stylistic quality of your final paragraph. You will be graded individually on the quantity and quality of your contribution to the creation of your paragraph and on the quality of your submitted conclusion sentence, whether it was chosen for the final paragraph or not.


 * Activity Author’s Note**: I use this activity every semester in the classroom, where I have the groups stand at the front of the class together and read their paragraphs. Each author reads his/her conclusion sentence, and then as a class we discuss whether we agree with their selection of a conclusion sentence or not. It is always a fun activity because the stories are always entertaining, the groups enjoy making stylistic decisions together, and there is exposure to as many conclusion sentences as there are students participating that day. I think doing the activity online would have the same advantages, plus the students might be more forward with their stylistic suggestions when they can simply type it on the existing document.

Critique Feedback from Orlantha Nin Peer Partnership & Team Activities Is the activity academically orientated?-- Yes, this provides a fun way to learn about a crucial writing skill in a group setting. I am sure that students who partake in your exercise will remember this each time they write a concluding sentence in the future. They will not only remember but they will smile as they remember the entertaining stories. Is it content-focused?- Yes, it focuses on learning a specific writing skill. Does it require learners to read one another's entries? This activity relies on student's reading one anothers entries. When you teach this face to face, they also have the advantage of hearing from other groups. Do you think they would be able to maintain this component of the exercise in a Wiki? Does it require that peers express what they agreed with or liked about each other's work? This could easily be incorporated into this team activity by ways of a peer evaluation process. According to Conrad and Donaldson "Team projects should require all members to be active in the development and decision-making process and to be individually accountable for their contributions. This can be accomplished through the team member evaluations discussed in Chapter three" (2004). Are you teaching reading classes at Saddleback College? If so, what is your course number?



===**Critique Feedback from Alannah Rosenberg**=== Evaluating this by the Checklist for an Effective Team Activity in Conrad and Donaldson, p. 62, I can answer "Yes" for all six questions. The paragraph is especially strong in being content-focused and in requiring critical thinking. Online learners are often quite busy and don't want to spend resources building a learning community -- they're like Jack Webb: "Just the facts." They may also resent being required to do things that don't directly advance that goal. This exercise creates a community as a by-product of the learning activity; the interaction is necessary to the project, and the project makes sense to each individual. Here, they **//need//** each other. I also like the diversity of topics.

Cindy,

The beauty of an activity like this is that instead of the instructor setting a bar for creative expectations, the students set (and raise) it for themselves because they are writing not just for the instructor to read, but with a real audience at hand. After doing an activity like this, you have established a culture for the class where they may anticipate further opportunities to be creative, to show off, etc.

What I would like you to do is think about how you would structure this for a purely online environment. To try to capture that intrinsically competitive aspect of the F2F experience, what if you had each student vote for the best concluding sentence (they one rule—they can’t vote for themselves or someone in their work group.) Include this as part of the evaluation process. That will give students an incentive to read one another’s statements as well and as a consequence, to see a wider variety of options that others have come up with.

For an online class, I would make your instructions less narrative and more “stepped”. For example: I have set up 5 wiki pages (a memorable…). I want you to: · Check them out and sign up for one · If there are already 5 people signed up, you’ll have to find another for yourself · You can’t switch groups once you’ve made your selection · Etc. This provides a quicker and easier way to access the steps.

For your final assignment next week, include this activity with changes you would make to present this for your online course.

LeeAnn