Playing with production of a group product

I'm toying with an idea of trying to get my Environmental Systems and Societies students to produce something online as a joint project. At first, I thought of setting up a structure of a spreadsheet on Google.doc in which each student has an assigned set of line numbers (like I did on the Resources types project) and each student writes their comments by the number I have placed on a spreadsheet line for them. But this becomes forced when students are trying to do word processing on a spreadsheet document.

Next I thought I'd start a Google.doc Word document with the student numbers, then have the students write their responses next to their number. After completing this, students could read what each other wrote and reflect on it in a space provided at the bottom of the document. This also was forced in the way it wouldn't flow.

My last thought was to divide the students into two groups, give each group a task, (like describing the various kinds of value people place on a given natural capital) a separate Google.doc Word document address, and have each produce a document in which each student writes their part of the final document and all of them are addressing the task to produce a cohesive product.

My most recent thinking is, why set up the Google.doc word processor sheet for them? Show them how to do it and let them produce it all. I abandon this idea because the energies directed toward learning to set up a Google.doc account (yes, they could use their ISB gmail account) would distract from their learning about the various kinds of values given to a resource.

I decided I would follow the path of having students select a resource, divide up the four kinds of values as suggested in our text and each volunteer to write one part of this document. Then I would have them read and append each other's documents. We would wrap up the learning about resources by suggesting which of the resources are more valuable to lesser developed countries (LDCs) or more developed countries (MDCs).

Dennis suggested, rather than having the students compose a Word document together, I have them fill in a table. I liked this idea, because I could put two columns, LDC and MDC, to the left of the table at the end, and students could place an 'X' by the resource that was more important in those kinds of developmental environments.

Thanks to Ronaldo F Cabuhat for the Flickr image of the forest and lake, the two resources the class chose to study further.

The class performed this activity on a day when class was shortened to 55 minutes. There were a few areas which were unexpected learning areas and some that were good for learning.

Some unexpected issues:
a) a student copy-and-pasted material from the Internet and did not give proper references to the source, nor did the student put quotation marks around the information. The student was not learning from the information they had found.
b) I did not find a way to add columns to a word-processer document on Google.doc. I copied the entire table, imported it into Word, added the two initial columns, and exported it back to the original Google.doc document.
c) The content was weak in some areas and the students in the cluster were not good about appending other student's work. There wasn't sufficient time to review all the resources before the end of class, so I had to amend the document so students did not learn the incorrect information presented in this document.
d) students became involved in Internet research that took longer than I had planned for. This delay was, in some instances, due to students not being specific enough in their selection of search terms.

The product that was produced was good for student learning. By coming up with a lot of values of a lake and forest, students created knowledge that helped them produce lists of values for a resource on their exam.