Look Teach! We’re on Time!

I’m one of those parents who HATES it with a passion when teachers doll out group assignments. It always ends up that someone doesn’t do their part and takes credit for everyone else’s work. Then there are the people whose pieces show up at 10:00p.m the night before it’s due and my poor kid is up till last midnight not only inserting it but most likely rewriting it because it sucks.
This is where we got the bright idea of using Groove as a “teachers’ monitor”. Putting a few kids on a 30 day version we experimented with a recent religion assignment (which the kids just love doing) and initially without the teacher we replaced her with me. I watched as the pieces started no coming in. I contacted parents and put out a few “reminders”. When the kids started to see how it kept track of messages (one girl got frustrated and started to threaten not to do her part i was quick to remind her that her comments were in stone and she better get back to work or the headmaster could get printed copies of sad threats.
As the deadline was closing in the final version was coming together nicely when one girl “forgot” she had a hockey tournament. That’s fine i said. You have a laptop and so type on the bus and when you get to the hotel you’ll sync automatically with the group, doesn’t matter where you are. That evening they hit hot spot at a Dunkin Donuts and there it was, the last piece of the project.. It was done before the weekend started and everyone had earned their part of the marks.
This also made it simple to know who to dock marks for plagiarism and how much each person truly committed to the entire project.
For teachers this means that should they adopt this methodology they can themselves be more in tune to the progress (or lack thereof and can provide much needed guidance, conveniently, at a distance whic makes their lives easier too!