Activity #4: Collective Intelligences

                After completing the Collective Intelligence Activity I think this is something I could incorporate into my math classroom.  I could put the students in groups of 5 or 6 and have them create “mini” collective intelligences to present to the class.  I’ve seen that students can put together and share resources with one another and the topic is free to change at times and engage students in further research.  I really liked the way different “topics” and research came about in the collective intelligence.  It was neat to see how other people think and share their own ideas through videos, pictures, and articles.  I do think I would need to set more specific parameters for the sixth graders, but that wouldn’t be a big problem.  I would also like the students to be a little bit more structured in terms of who wrote what.  The biggest thing is that the students are participating and engaging in the activity, not just letting everyone else post and taking credit for it.  At times in our activity it was hard to tell who wrote what, or who was responding to whom in their responses.  I really liked the freedom the collective intelligence allowed and I would definitely like to complete one in my class.

                As stated in my earlier response to the readings, some of the things we did in the collective intelligence were “off” topic or moving away from the original subject.  While that is alright for the purpose we were using it for, I do see that potential to shift directions as a problem for sixth grade students.  On one hand, it is great because the students will engage in the research and post opinions and responses to one another if they get more off-topic.  However, at the same time, I would like the students to stay as closely related to math as possible so stricter guidelines may need to be implemented.  I still feel that my sixth graders would need a solid two weeks to learn how to post to the collective intelligence as they are not very “tech savvy.”  They’ve not had any technology work at all before this year and several students still need help logging in.  While it is not impossible, it will take some more time to implement something like this.