I enjoyed the two activities we did in class Monday. I think they are a fun and inventive way to assign groups. The more I am learning about the benefits of group work, the more I think I will be using them in my class. However, I do not think it is beneficial to have students pick their own groups. When I was in high school, group work was another word for talking with my friends. Usually students will pair with their friends, rush through the work, and not get what they just did so they can talk with their friends. I liked the idea of having each group come up with names that go together then redistributing those cards (I forget what the activity was called). It is an even and fair way to break into groups without students scheming their way to be with their friends.
Can I please state how excited I am for the canonical wikis! This has been one of my fears about student teaching/ teaching is coming up with ideas on how to teach texts/authors/themes. I think this is such a great idea and I am excited to see what everyone comes up with.
I have been working on my multi-genre autobiography for a couple weeks now. It is so funny to find all these pictures of books, movies, television shows, and music I was into as a kid. I would find pictures and laugh and I even looked some up on youtube to reminance about my childhood! I love this project. I think it would be a great icebreaker in a classroom especially introducing myself as a new teacher.
After reading the article "How the Web Was Won" I was fascinated at how computer-savy these guys were. I have never read or heard of how the internet or anything came about. It was amazing to read that it has been around for awhile, but with the hype of other notorious events it got lost in the shuffle. Robert Cailliau stated that computers had been around but people did not use them for anything but playing games. However, people did not know what else to do with their computers. How people were so fascinated by hyperlinks- Jann Wenner founder and editor of Rolling Stones "you could click on this blue, highlighted, underlined word and then, bam, go to a whole new level of information was dazzling." It is comical to read this and realize how big and popular the internet is now. Everyone is using it for many different reasons. There are few people who do not use the internet. I do not think I go a day without using the internet. The possibilities now on the internet are endless and are used for so many reasons. You can get an education one-hundred percent online, you can run a business solely from the web, you can chat with people from around the world. The '90s was the creation of many websites: Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay, which are still the top sites today. When Craig's List started it began as 10-12 people now it has over 40 million users! It is amazing to see how far the internet and computers have gone since the 1960s.
I agree with your points on group work; I think that for the first two or three months of school, letting students pick their own groups is a mistake. There is too much to catch up on, and talk about, and students are much more likely to only work with the people they already know. However, I think once the guidelines for class work and a community is built in the classroom, it would be ok, depending on the class, for students to pick their own groups based on who they want to work with. Letting students have choices in the classroom shows that they are in charge of their own learning, and while it is more work for the teacher, I think it can be beneficial for students to have this initiative.
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