When finding the big idea for a project you must first
identify the overarching concepts, you want your students to understand. From
there reflect on why these concepts are important. (Boss and Kross, 2007) I think taking
the time to reflect on all the aspects of your lesson is an essential component
to the success of it. When we take the time to reflect, we walk through what
our students will be doing and this uncovers problem areas and other parts of
the topic that you would not have otherwise thought of. You can then think of
how to help your students unveil the answers on their own. Doing this practice
will help your students gain a deeper understanding of the material. Another important
piece is that your projects should be authentic to the student and relate to
the real world.
Boss and
Kross suggest that our projects involve the use of 21st century skills
and 21st century literacies. Your project should “stretch their intellectual
muscles in ways traditional learning activities may not” (47). Just like it has
been drilled in our other education classes, they suggest we plan for learning actions
that associated with the higher order categories of Bloom’s Taxonomy of
Educational Objectives; particularly analyze, evaluate, and create. Creating questions with these verbs will drive
the student’s actions. Along with this, our students should be collaborating with
each other to build 21st century literacy skills. This set of skills
is much more than just reading and writing, it goes beyond the classroom. It is
a model that highlights digital age literacy, inventive thinking, effective
communication, high productivity. They
will learn how to live in our increasingly digital world and acquire important life
skills.
There are
eight essential learning functions and almost all of them pertain to our
project. The first is ubiquity: learning inside and outside the classroom at
all times. To utilize this, Sabrina and I communicate our ideas back and forth
on Google Doc and with our mobile phones. The second is Deep Learning, where we
have to navigate and sort through information. Some example is videos on
demand, primary source archives, and real time data sets. The third is making
things visible and discussable. We used this with our mind maps so we could
look at the big picture of the butterfly project and the little components we
were thinking we needed to do. This makes it so much easier to get your ideas
out and build on each others. The fourth is expressing ourselves, sharing ideas,
and building a community. As a class, we do this with our blogs but
other tools are virtual meeting, social software, tagging, and Webinars. The
fifth is collaboration where we teach and learn from each other using a shared
application. Some of the tools are wikis, web-based offices, and webinar tools.
I think this falls under the category of
our google docs. I like that we can have a real time collaboration and we don’t
have to send and download a bunch of different documents to each other. I just
have to get used to using the tools. The six is research which involves using quality
directories, search engines with filtering, bookmarks, and citation generators.
The seventh is project management; it helps students manage time, work, sources,
feedback from others, drafts and products during the project. The eighth is reflection
where you examine your ideas from all sides and other points of view.
I agree with the fact that reflection is important. Thinking about how else to help your students is key. I think that it is also important for students to use 21st century skills and 21st century literacies. Students need to be able to learn the skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Students also need to be able to live in our increasingly digital world. Therefore, skills like communication and inventive thinking are necessary. I also think that the eight essential learning functions are important when it comes to project-based learning.
ReplyDeleteI like your examples of our class blogs, and using the google docs for real time collaboration. It definitely takes some getting used to because there are so many different websites out there available to us. It is hard to be able to just do a simple search and pick the perfect thing. Tools available to us are only growing as well, it will be important to keep on top of it and make the most of them.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post April, it is very detailed and informative. A big thing that I agree with you on is how important reflecting is. I also talked about it in my blog post. I enjoyed the examples you included in your post as examples of the collaboration, like the blogs and how we use Google docs on the computers/phones/tablets for different things including that real world connection as to how we are using it helps to make it easier to understand how we could use it in the classroom or how students could use it. I like how you discussed Blooms Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, this is something all teachers need and should be incorporating into lessons and into PBL because it gets students into higher order thinking and if we incorporate that in with collaboration then students are building on their 21st century literacy skills. I like how you defined 21st century literacy skills as it being a model that highlights digital age literacy. I think that defines it very well. I think from this chapter the main thing we need to remember as teachers is to first identify the overarching concept and then reflect on them to determine why they are important which you included in your post. I am looking forward to learning more about all of these different things and seeing how it all works out in the classroom one day.
ReplyDelete-Michelle