Making assignments more meaningful: creating a shared website in class.

As part of the Geography of a Global Village course, I asked my students to write posts on the issues we covered, rather than hand in essays or do presentations. The objective was to create a shared source of information that would remain after the course was finished. The implementation was pretty straightforward with Google Sites. And, at the end of the course, I asked what they learned from the experience: - students paid more attention to their writing, both in form and content, as they knew other students would be reading their post. - ´I feel confident I can now create a website of my own.’ - it was more stress to some, but assignments were done on time. - students were able to read other students work and learn about what was important and how they could improve their own work (depth, visual presentation, organisation, etc). I particularly like that assignments are no longer just for the teacher, but gain a real meaning, and that students can see each other’s work. Making the website public would require a lot more work, but could certainly be an objective for other courses. I feel the experiment was a success and will certainly ask students to write posts for a website again in my teaching.