Experience with SMART amp

Story Eleven

Plan, contribute, share and store

SMART amp offers an infinite number of possibilities to prepare students amazing learning environments and workspaces stuffed with incredible activities.

However, I´m not going to talk about ways of creating workspaces offering a deep pedagogical experience. I´ve come to realize that it is also a great tool for organizing students´ work and storing it. And, what´s more, with little of teacher´s involvement, which is – quite frankly – what we aim at while using SMART amp.

What really helped me a lot was taking part in project called Global Teenager. Every month several challenges were published and it was purely upon the schools which ones they want to undergo. I insisted on my class completing all of them, which meant a lot of effort and efficient organizing to make it alongside with having regular lessons.

Anyway, in the workspace I shared the challenges and gave students some time to organize groups and agenda.

The steps and rules were following:

Choose a challenge that suits you and find others to work on it with you.

If there are too many people in on group, reconsider if it wouldn´t be better to join other group so that you can contribute to the other particular challenge more.

Discuss how much time you need and share tasks.

Decide on a deadline when you publish your work in the workspace.

It does not matter which tool you use, the only thing is that it is possible to share it in the workspace.

I strongly believe in the idea of self-reliance and he above mentioned step in my eyes represent the idea of being informed, assuming  responsibility and … .

What´s more, if necessary, we can simply come back to the workspace and get the material we need to share somewhere else – as it was the case of the project´s wikis – and use it. Needless to say that the material can be “recycled” later on for other purposes.

To sum up, workspaces are a great hoarding of students´ work.