The importance of sharing. My first mistake already :)

For my grade 11 biology course I am running in Fiji (summer school) I created a pre-trip learning activity. Students were to watch the video Sharkwater if possible. If not, I gave a link to an article about the same topic of illegal shark hunting and finning.

I provided some prompts to students and held an online discussion in our closed course Moodle.

The discussion has been just awesome. Students are demonstrating amazing communication skills, critical thinking skills and are directing their own learning to find out about things we will be learning in our course (genetics, taxonomy, binomial nomenclature, ecology, indicator species, etc.). They are having an excellent debate about the use of force to prevent shark hunting and finning.

The discussion is awesome. The place for the discussion is all wrong. The discussion should have been public. We should have shared. We should have invited others who had seen the video to join in with us.

I have attempted to move the discussion to our class blog here, but it never works to move locations once a discussion like that has already started. I have learned my first lesson about this course already. I have some excellent communicators. I look forward to following their blogs are we travel through Fiji. I look forward to learning from them.