Blog Task II

Multicultural & Cooperative Learning

drill & practice software

Task 2

Blog Entry due 18 May 2009, 8:30 p.m.

In the session about Learning Theories and Principles of Learning we created a number of posters. Pick one poster that you think is especially interesting and write your second blog post about this.

I found it difficult to make a decision between the various posters as they all have things to comment on. So I decided to comment on two posters and to compare them afterwards.

The first one is the poster of task number eight which shows the multicultural and cooperative learning. I like the appearance and the design very much. In the middle you have the keywords “multicultural & cooperative learning” and together they form the shape of a boomerang. The meaning of a boomerang is obvious: You throw it and it comes back to you. This can be transferred to our theme: You give something and you get something back. One point for example is called “communication”. When you get in touch with people all over the world (via Skype, chat, Email) then you will also gain something from it. They will answer and communication is easily taking place.

Besides the point “communication” you can find the points “presentation” which includes homepages, podcasts and web blogs and “research” e.g. search engines and online libraries.

What I really like about this poster is that it is pretty self explaining and clearly arranged. The examples of each of the three points make it very easy to understand what is meant.

Nevertheless I think the main theme could be highlighted more. Maybe you could understand the topic of the poster even faster if the designers of the poster had chosen to make a question out of the topic for example “How can multicultural and cooperative learning be realized in class?”. Then it would probably be more obvious that all the small subsections belong to the opening question.

The second poster I would like to comment on is the one about drill & practice software. This can be compared to the first poster I have chosen because there are some things that are not so good like on the first poster and vice versa.

On this poster I do not like the design very much. There are no keywords but mainly text. And also the separation of the subsections “reasons” and “useful” is not very clear. A better subdivision would have been “pro’s & con’s” or “It is useful & It is not useful”. This would have been much easier for the reader of the poster to interpret it. Nevertheless I like the obvious heading. Everyone knows what the poster is about as it has got a clear opening question.

In the end I have to say that both posters are very well written and good designed especially concerning the contents. But both posters can also be improved a little bit as I already pointed out above.