Authoring doKu
To add a doKu activity to your design, just drag and drop the activity in the authoring canvas and double click on it to set it up.
doKu Content
On the Basic or Content tab, you are able to set:
Title Make sure you use a meaningful title that summarises what the students are meant to do.
Description/case Here’s the description of the case you want the students to discuss and respond to.
and the Document base If you want to provide the students with a document template or base for them to use as guidance to construct their own document, this is where you can do so.
Advanced Settings
Now, this is where doKu opens a ton of possibilities. Some of these settings make doKu very very powerful. So let’s start looking at them.
Leader Selection
This is based on the Leader Selection tool -where members of a team/class select one student to be the team leader.
The role of a team leader is to -in the context of doKu, to be the scribe for the team.
So, If you enable the “Use Leaders from Select Leader tool”, then only the team leader will be able to type/edit the document. All other non-leaders will be able to watch in real-time the leader typing, but they won’t be able to contribute themselves.
Why and when do you want this option? Well, imagine that you have many people in a group (10+ for instance), if you let them all write at the same time, it can be messy. So it’s better to set up one person that acts as a scribe on behalf of the team/class.
Synthesise knowledge from the whole class
The second option “All leaders participate together” is usually used to summarise the contribution of a very large class into a single document/assignment.
For instance, say you have 50 students in your class and you have split them in 10 teams (5 students in each team). Each team has been discussing the subject topic in previous activities and now you want them all (the 50 of them!) to converge into a single document all they have discussed.
Clearly 50 people typing on a document can get out of control very quickly. However, you can set this to only the leaders of each of the groups can type. That will mean that 1 person (the leader of each of team) will type on behalf of their team with the rest of the leaders from the other teams. So instead o having 50 people writing, you will have only the leaders of each of the 10 teams converging all the knowledge on a single document for the whole class.
Advanced Options
Time restrictions and limitations
Here, you can set a time limitation (in number of minutes) that you want students to have from the moment they enter this activity. Leave it at 0 for no time restrictions.
You can change this later in the lesson
In the lesson you are able to set up a whole range of time limits (hard deadlines, extensions for the particular teams or individual students
Enable Chat
If you using this activity synchronously (with all students in the activity at the same time), then enabling the Chat feature will allow students to exchange messages while they simultaneously collaborate in the document creation.
Example of how students will see chat when you "Enable chat"in doKu:
The option “Show the line numbers” includes a line numbering for the doKu. This is useful when you want to restrict the length of the students' response.
Share documents across doKu activities
Advanced Feature!
To illustrate this feature, let’s use a very common teaching practice: we want students to first write their own initial thoughts about a topic, then we give them a set of materials to read and discuss, and finally we want them to go back to their first initial thoughts and expand/change them according to their new acquired knowledge.
This is precisely what this feature allows you to do.
In the first doKu activity give the document a name (i.e.: “Doc1”) and enter it in the “Share pad id”. Then in the second doKu activity down the line in your design, include the same name (“Doc1”) in the “Share pad id”. Now the second doKu will render the “Doc1” document from the previous doKu.
You can create incredibly powerful educational designs reusing documents. Take a look at the following example learning design on Brainwriting:
Gallery Walks
Gallery Walks are a classroom-based active learning strategy where students are encouraged to build on their knowledge about a topic by interacting with other students.
In a classroom setup, students are able to explore different “works” that are placed around the classroom (stations). At each station, the students interact with the work and learn by asking questions to other peers.
In the context of doKu, when students or their teams finish their document, the teacher starts the Gallery Walks which then allows all of the students to see other teams' documents.
Students then are able to review, provide comments and rate each other’s work.
When you start the Gallery Walk in the lesson, the instructions on how to conduct the review are displayed to the students. These are the instructions that you can include in the “Instructions for Gallery Walk” shown above.
If you just want the student to see each other’s work but do not want them to do comments and/or ratings (read-only), then make sure you set the “Disable commentary and rating”.
Learning Outcomes
Mapping learning outcomes to activities is very useful for curriculum mapping.
As with all activities in LAMS, you can map your learning outcomes to this activity. If you want to add a learning outcome, just search for the particular outcome or type a new one it will be added to your list of learning outcomes for the future.
You can search Learning Outcomes by code or name.
Reflection and End of Activity
As in all LAMS activities, you are able to get your students to reflect on the activity as soon as they finish. This is an important part of learning and research shows that it is when we reflect upon what we just learn that long lasting learning forms.
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