Jig-Saw Activity--A Great Way To Get Students to Learn Interactively!

Last week, my Methods of Science Education class focused on creating a mock Jig-Saw activity.  We split up into groups of five where we each determined one of the five kingdoms to research on our own.  Then, we created new groups, our "expert groups."  In these groups, we all had the same kingdom and we shared, via GoogleDocs, the information we gathered to make sure we all had similar information.  After the "expert groups" reviewed their shared information and created a worksheet for the rest of their original groups, we all taught our groups about our kingdoms we studied.  We took notes on our laptops during everyone's lessons into our Jot Charts via Microsoft Word.  After our class was over, our teacher assigned us to take an online quiz where we were asked to save our desktop image and upload it to our blogs!

I really enjoyed this activity and will use it in my future classroom.  I thought it was a great idea because students learn the most when they teach others.  It was also a great way to teach students the importance of good note-taking skills because there was an online quiz to be followed afterward.  The online quiz is a great way to assess the students' learning from this lesson.  I loved this assignment and thought it was great to get students motivated about a certain topic because they are to be considered "experts" in that field.  

Here are the results from my online quiz about the 5 Kingdoms.  As you can see, it was a great learning experience because I received a perfect score for my quiz!

Here is the link to the quiz, maybe you could take the quiz and realize the importance of the Jig-Saw activity and learning from peers! :) The Kingdoms of Life.