Duration: 2:13
Students from Ruawai Primary School and their teacher talk about how they are developing key competencies through writing collaborations.
Brad Thomas:
A senior class at Ruawai Primary School has come up with an innovative way to write narrative stories in a collaborative fashion. The students get into a group of three and then they divide up specific tasks.
Student:
So if I was writing, and I was writing the story, and Liam was doing the recrafting and Reo was commenting the ideas.
Brad Thomas:
The first student will create the document and then share that document with the other two students.
Student:
When I recraft I look for spelling mistakes, errors, make sure the sentence makes sense.
Brad Thomas:
They do a peer review looking for punctuation, spelling, and then the third person is tasked with helping that person to come up with some new and interesting ideas.
Student:
When a document is shared, my job is to comment on what ideas can be put into the story. And when I go to comment, I go to the box on the right hand corner up top, then I write ideas of what you can put, add, put in, and add, and yeah.
Brad Thomas:
Working in this collaborative nature really helps to develop the key competencies of critical thinking and relating to others. So, the person that has created the story really has to critically think about the advice and comments that the other person has given them, and also the two people working with that person have to learn how to comment in a positive and specific way. So giving feedback has become an integral part of the writing process, and it also helps to create a wider audience for the student’s work. They share their work with their peers and then once they have done some critical thinking around that work they are then able to then share it to their teacher.
Student:
So when the story is finished we share it with the teacher. Most of the time she leaves comments and ideas for us to fix our stories up on, and sometimes if it’s really, really good, we stick it on our blogs.