Just wanted to share some of reflective comments from my freshmen following our first wiki collaborative essay. Out of the 24 in the class, 23 praised the project and said it was a great learning experience. I've posted several of the comments under "comments" on this post. Check out what some of them said:Also, here are the links and passwords to a few of the wiki essays. Feel free to login and look around at how I set it up:
http://edgarallanpoe.pbwiki.com/
edgarallan
http://poedeath.pbwiki.com/
deathpoe
7 comments:
Ryan D’Arcy 3/16/07 English Period 9 Comments on Assignment
I felt that this assignment I was a fun and beneficial experience. My group, which consisted of Val Hanson, Laura Ajaeb, and I, worked efficiently and evenly distributed the work load amongst us. I enjoyed writing a joint essay because of the different point of views being incorporated in its construction. We all shared our strengths and weaknesses with writing an essay and helped each other improve on them. When a conflict would arise, which rarely happened do to spectacular group chemistry, we would discuss the problem as a group and deal with it appropriately. Having never done a group essay before, I was a little nervous to how it would go. Would the group cooperate? Would we finish the assignment in time? How would we distribute the work load? These were all questions flooding through my mind. After working a mere day with my group all these worries vanished. We were easily able to complete the essay and did a very good job. Do to everyone’s unique and different literary strengths, we were all did our part and I believe created a very good essay.
Excerpted from Val Hanson's second reflective comment:
Another thing that I learned from this essay was that there are many others, including many in my own English class, that are much better and more complex writers than I am. Those people write more complex and much more fluently. I will try to be better writers like they are and I will work very hard at it. Anyways, I learned a lot form this group essay and thought it was a good project to work with to improve our writing skills. I also think it went over very well with the groups and many enjoyed it, including myself.
Comments from all three members of http://Poedeath.pbwiki.com
I believe that this assignment was a good idea. I was glad that we didn't have to write a whole essay ourselves, and this helped me focus more on writing well, rather than just getting it done. I enjoyed working with a group and would like to do this again.
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I liked this project a lot it was much easier to write an essay in a group with different writing talents. When you write by yourself, you dont have different opinions like you do when you are in a group. I understand that an obstacle could be that your group members did not agree with each other, but we did not experience that problem. I learned that I am not a very strong writer, but working with two other people that were stronger writers than me gave me ideas of how to change my writing.
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I felt that this group of three working on an essay is a brilliant way to get things done, because no one has to write too much, so they put more effort into the writing that they do. Besides this, the way it is done gives you options about the paragraphs, so you can choose which ones that you want.
Nick Johnson's thoughts:
During the task of creating a five paragraph essay on why Edgar Allan Poe understood death more than most, I experienced many things. Such things were a pretty good group communication level, quick but good decisions, accurate information sources, and good fun. But there were obstacles too, obstacles including lack of communication outside of school, not always knowing what to do/on task, and not a lot of advice for revising. But there was definitely more positives than negatives. From this project I learned about writing that it is much easier to write a five paragraph essay in groups but not in all ways. For example it was less work and writing, but in the process it was hard to see what the other person is doing without talking to them (even though we had comments usage). As a writer I learned that you can trust other people with the work and don’t have it all rely upon you, and I definitely like it.
Emily Gac's thoughts:
I liked the uniquiness of this project and how we got to use this wiki space. Having two or more people writing the essay worked out really well because together we had to learn to combine our own forms of writing into one to make it the best.
Bree's comments:
I think that we worked well as a group and our final essay turned out pretty good. I liked this project and the personalities we had working together, helped us build off each other and have more developed ideas than we would have if we worked on our own. Each of us had our strengths and weaknesses, although i have no weaknesses, kidding, and we used each other to build the parts of the essay we were not as good at. This was a good way to write an essay and i would like to do it again.
Example group evaluation using the comment function on PB Wiki:
Planning- For Planning we think that we should recieve a 6. Everyone had a rough draft and we all made many corrections to each other's writings, giving lots of great ideas.
Meaning- As a group, we think that for Meaning we deserve a 5.5. We made some insightful connections that weren't printed in black and white. A couple connections we made were only made from the help of Mr. Stratton.
Development- In the development section, we decided that we deserve a 5. We realize that our transitions could be better, but think that our essay fully explains the point that Edgar Allan Poe knows death.
Organization- we think that we should get a 6 in organization. we like the way our essay is set up, and the format we used. To us, it sounds like it flows very well.
Language Use- Our group thought a 5 would suffice for Language Use. Our sentence structure supports our christensen knowledge and our group corrections have made our vocabulary in the essay far greater than it would have been if we had worked alone.
Conventions- We decided that our group should get a 6 in conventions. We triple checked all of our mechanics and think that we have covered most of them.
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