Jigsaw Classroom

The Jigsaw method is a very smart method in reinforcing knowledge to students, and making them learn from one another. What it does is separates students into different groups, all with the same task. However, within that task each student has a role to play, the same as each student in each group. Using the groups, a student can learn about the same task as another student, and then go and learn from them, enhancing both student's knowledge on the task at hand. Once that is done, the student can then confidently teach his fellow group members about his role that he was assigned to. This works wonderfully for every student in the group.

Even if a classroom had only 5 computers, the jigsaw groups would still thrive. Each person with the same role as another student from a different group could team up at a computer to combine their search. This would work perfect for a class of 25, where there could be 5 students in a group, and  5 people with the same roles from every group. Once that is done, they can return to their original groups, and teach eachother based off of what they know. The biggest advantage is that everyone gets to learn from one another and communicate, while still being able to work as a group. There would be no "this group vs. that group," or any of the competitive nature amongst students. They could all work together to form the same answers, while still learning the lesson plan. It also makes it easier for the teacher who can monitor the students progress, while still making sure everyone learns from the activity.

Although it does have some great advantages, one problem could be that the student to student information may not be the most trustworthy, and the teacher would probably have to step in a lot to make sure the students were getting the right information. If even one person doesn't have the right information, the whole class could be learning irrelevant and inaccurate material.