18th lesson 21th May 2007 (45 minutes) – repeating for examination

Goal of the lesson – to repeat the learned topics and to get ready for examination.

Topics:
1. Building the structure for tagcloud.
2. Creation of concept map of project management subject.

For motivating the students I seed that he goal of the lesson is to create crib for examination. For me the goal was investigate how they can arrange the information of project management field? Also to find out do they prefer tag cloud or concept map.

Reorganizing the tagcloud
At first I will present them what are the opportunities in del.icio.us for reorganize the tagcloud (grouping the tags, sort based ob alphabetical order or on frequency of the tag, filters based on tags frequency). Students are asked to define the titles for the tag groups. They can collect ideas from the content of learning resources.

Concept map
There is two ways how to create concept maps:
1. Draw down what are the most important concepts in project management field? How those concepts are related with each other? What are the central issues of the concept map. During this process teacher can’t provide the concept names or relations between them.
2. Based on your tagcloud the names of the groups of the tags are the most important concepts in the project management field. Draw a map based on this information.
Not sure jet in what order those topics should be presented. One solution is to let them at first to draw the concept map and then group the tags in tagcloud based on concept map information. The other solution is to get overview of the project management subject using the tagcloud and grouping them. Concept map will be drawn later based on tagcloud information.

I prefer the second strategy – first grouping the tags and then creation of concept map. This is also better solution from technical point of view – grouping the tags is easier and shorter task then creation of concept map. If we start from concept map it’s possible, that some of the students do not reach to the task of the grouping of the tags.

During the examination I would like to investigate to they prefer tagcloud or concept map and why?

Both of the exercises must be finished as home tasks.  The structured tagcloud and the concept map must be compatible with each other. This is also good method for preparing for the exam. The concept map will be published in Google Docs environment.
Report
This lesson was totally different from the lesson plan.

Most of the students were missing. Only 7 students from 17 were participating. The reason is that this lesson was one extra session – not on the regular weekday and last lesson of this day. Probably some of the students forgot the lesson. Some of them did not feel the need to participate. Pity.

Most of the time was spent to the introducing the method of grouping the tags. This was totally new for the students but they seamed to be interested. The other time consuming activity was the enrichment of the tagcloud. This started spontaneously. I did not plan that. Some of the students find out that their tagcloud is not so rich as is some other student’s tagcloud. They started to view the content and adding the new bookmarks and tags. Finally they understood that tagcloud can be useful during the exam. They also started to correct the tags – eliminate the synonyms and to correct some orthographical mistakes.

The grouping of the tags proceeded very slowly and painfully. Students at this age do not have skills for systematization. They asked me to provide the names for the groups and to define what tags belong under this group. I did not want to do that. I created only one example and then asked them to proceed. I also gave them some hints – remember what the phases of project life cycle are? I think that this was not very vise thing to do. It would be interesting to see, how many students are affected from this hint?

We did not have time for concept mapping at all. Very sad. About 45 extra minutes were needed. Actually it would be better to have this lesson on regular time wit the duration 90 minutes and exam on next week but what can you do. I’m away from Estonia on next week.

Overall rate to lesson 3.