|
Design Issues
One of the most significant changes in instruction that learning centers
bring to the classroom is the need for multiple lessons that will be implemented
simultaneously at each station. The added challenge here is that
students will not work on the lessons in the same order since they will
all start at different stations and rotate around. This means that
one lesson cannot depend on another since you cannot be sure that a given
group has already gone through a prerequisite lesson at a different learning
station. When developing learning centers it is always important
to keep this issue in mind and to come up with lessons that are not dependent
on one another. For example, if you were developing a set of learning
centers for use with the Stowaway
Adventure you would not want to make one of the stations collecting
ship data and another station the analysis of that data. If you did
try this you would run into trouble when one of the groups who had yet
to collect ship data got to the station at which they needed to do the
analysis since they would have no data to analyze (unless groups were using data
collected on a previous day.)
Another important aspect of designing your learning centers concerns
the length of time students spend at each station. Some approaches
have students rotating through all of the stations within one class period
of approximately 50 minutes. From a technology perspective this is
nice because it allows all of the students time on the computers (provided
they are one of the stations) within the same class period. Especially
for younger grades this can be important since often students all want
their turn on the computers. The downside to this is that the time
spent at each station is very small. With five stations you would
have only ten minutes per station. This is hardly enough time to
accomplish even a small task. In addition, if a problem is encountered,
such as a computer crashing, the time it takes to get back up and running
can really throw off your schedule. A better approach is to give
each group a full class period at each station. Although this means
you will need to develop more extensive lessons for each station it will
greatly enhance the impact the technique has on the students.
|
