Wish you had been here

Wish you had been here : Wallwisher
 - How to follow pupils’ activity in a learning process

Mr. Timo Fordell 5th grade teacher and Mrs. Hanna Kukkonen English and German teacher.

In our school we have used collaborative and learner centered methods in teaching and learning for several years. The problem has been how to observe pupils’ activity and commitment during the learning process.  Traditional tools didn’t provide enough information for us teachers.

When we started using internet based Wallwisher we discovered that it met our needs better. Wallwisher is an application in internet where anybody who has rights to certain wall can post a text based on a given task by the teacher.

Geography: Europe

In the beginning we didn’t give instructions specific enough and that’s why pupils wrote too similar sentences or answers to given questions or tasks. When we started to instruct them to mark their posts by number according to their visit to the wall the result was:  no two posts could be the same. This way they were forced to read all the previous posts before they could write their own post. In this process they learn much from the subject in an easy way! The early bird catches the worm - those pupils who are first on the wall have advantage to write whatever they want to about the subject. In this way the teacher can observe the activity of the students.

Even with simple sentences written by individual pupils the final result will be manifold.
The cumulated information made by the whole group of learners can be used as a base for further learning.

History: Egypt

So far we have used the Wallwisher in Finnish, English, German, history and science.

In languages the main point is to encourage learners to produce text in their own level.  In the general level the aim is to encourage learners to produce a piece of information as a member of a learning group. Everybody contributes to the final result. The wall isn’t finished until everyone has done their own part.

The pupils have responded very well to these tasks – they can use their creativity freely. The task is not too complicated or time consuming – on the contrary, pupils seem to enjoy producing text and pictures more and better than the teacher expects. The biggest challenge for us teachers is to create tasks interesting enough in order to keep the pupils’ interest alive. If you are interested we recommend to visit www. wallwisher.com / www.padlet.com

English: word of the day, imagine