Forum Getting Started: Grouping

By: Peter Miller

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...and if I'd read the manual or recalled my own sequences, I'd have remembered that the author specifies the *number* of groups, not the size. Given that the teacher normally knows the approximate size of the class, the desired group size can be readily achieved, give-or-take a little overspill.

Personally I've found this to be an extremely convenient and rapid way to form groups.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: James Dalziel

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Hi Peter,

Yes, as you say in your second post, you specify a number of groups, eg 6, then LAMS allocates how ever many students you have to this number of groups. So in your example, you'd get 5 groups of 2, and 1 group of 3.

Glad to hear you've found this feature useful. In the next major release of LAMS (V1.1), we'll add two more grouping modes: (a) teacher specified - so that as teacher you choose (in Monitor) who goes into each group (and how many students are in each group); and (2) group size - so LAMS will create groups of a particular size (it will keep creating new groups as it fills its "quota" on its current group).

Hope this helps!

Posted by James Dalziel

By: James Dalziel

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One more thing about groups - you can have more than one grouping in a sequence, and then switch between groupings for different tasks.

For example, you could create two different groupings (of the same or different sizes), then you could have a chat or forum to debate an issue in small groups. After this you could have another debate or chat on a follow-on topic, but it could run with different groups (if you wanted students to experience a variety of views from debating with different groupings of students).

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Robyn Philip

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Hi,

Another way to organise grouping is to give instructions about which room/resources or activities a particular group of students should enter or use.

For example, I want students in a role play exercise to go from their classroom groups, outside of LAMS, and continue in that group once they log into LAMS. I set up say 4 chat rooms in a LAMS sequence, group them together as an optional activity, and name them so that students know which chat room to choose.

So, chat room 1 in a history exercise on World War 1 might be for the soldiers who go to the front; chat room 2 for the women left at home; chat room 3 for the politicians; and chat room 4 for the generals and air commanders.

Share resources can be grouped in a similar way.

Robyn

Posted by Robyn Philip

By: James Dalziel

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Yes, this suggestion on grouping from Robyn works well.

Another similar approach is where you want to offer students several different topics to work on: say, you are teaching "great people from history", you want to have four different people that students can work on (they each choose one). You could start with an optional activity with 4 Share Resources - each named according to the relevant great person. After this, you could have another optional activity, this time with 4 Forums - again named for the relevant great person, and so on for subsequent tasks.

In this way, you can run parallel streams on different topics within a single LAMS sequence. It's might sound a little cumbersome, but students adapt to it remarkably easily once they first understand how you've structured the sequence.

In future versions of LAMS (after the V1.1 release), we plan to provide much more powerful functions for multiple pathways, branching, etc - but this is some way off (probably second half of 2006, based on current development).

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Peter Miller

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These are useful tips. Last year I had 4 identical sequences running in parallel for students pre-allocated to groups, i.e. one sequence per group. Each group used the combined Share Resources/Forum activity to research gene patents and then discussed what they found with their group before submitting a report. Running them in parallel as above would have saved significantly on setup time.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: Karen Baskett

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I agree with James that this type of grouping works very well and that students find it quite simple to follow. The added bonus of using optional activities to groups students vs running seperate sequences for each group is that you can have students working individually and then bring them back in as a group to share their information with the other groups.

Posted by Karen Baskett