Cooperative Learning

I think we ask students to participate in cooperative learning so that they can learn social skills as well as textbook knowledge. It's very important that our students learn to work with others and consider and respect other people's opinions. There is so much that they can learn from each other! Last year I did a project with my third graders that required them to work cooperatively to create a Powerpoint presentation on a planet I assigned to them. The actual projects turned out well, with only a few things I plan to change this year. First of all, I did not assign specific jobs to each group member, so the workload was very uneven in most groups as one student would be an overachiever and one would choose to let his partners do the work for him. Second, this year I will have the groups do their projects on an online presentation program like Slideboom so the project is not saved under any one person's name and everyone can work on it at the same time from their own computers. This way, it takes care of the problem of absenteeism, and the cooperative learning can go on no matter what. I do, however, need to look into the online programs like Slideboom a little more and find out the specifics of how to do that in a third grade classroom.