Introduction
Last year, I took a course called Math for Elementary Teachers that focused on strategies for problem solving. Not only did we learn strategies for solving problems, but we also engaged in online problem solving exercises in which small groups of students collaborated in a chat room to practice these strategies and solve problems. Initially, the most frustrating thing about these activities was that we were not allowed to orally communicate with our group members like we did every day in class. We were only allowed to communicate via the chat room. Without direct instruction from the professor about the problems we were required to solve, it left the entire class shipwrecked, frustrated, and we had to rely on technology to share ideas to collaborate and solve problems.
As the activity progressed, we were able to build off of one another’s strengths and weaknesses and we were all surprised at the work we were able to accomplish. After struggling to complete the activity, our professor provided additional instruction and she demonstrated the ways in which we could use the chat room to help us solve problems together. We realized that this kind of collaboration could be done outside of the classroom as we all had computers in our various locations across campus and it became easier for us to help each other and collaborate on homework assignments. Without technology and without the ability to collaborate with classmates to solve problems outside of the classroom, we wouldn’t have been able to learn as much as we did, and we definitely wouldn’t have been able to succeed on our own without the professor’s explicit and sometimes boring instruction.
As the activity progressed, we were able to build off of one another’s strengths and weaknesses and we were all surprised at the work we were able to accomplish. After struggling to complete the activity, our professor provided additional instruction and she demonstrated the ways in which we could use the chat room to help us solve problems together. We realized that this kind of collaboration could be done outside of the classroom as we all had computers in our various locations across campus and it became easier for us to help each other and collaborate on homework assignments. Without technology and without the ability to collaborate with classmates to solve problems outside of the classroom, we wouldn’t have been able to learn as much as we did, and we definitely wouldn’t have been able to succeed on our own without the professor’s explicit and sometimes boring instruction.
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