Chapter 3 RR

What’s the “Big Idea”?

When designing a project or lesson, the teacher must think about what real-world context will help the students better understand the project and the main idea behind the project.  PBL can help this because the students will become invested in learning and researching about the project.  One great thing that can come from this, is when the students start getting involved in the community while doing their projects.  This helps build a better sense of community and tie with the people in their community. 

 

Planning for Rigor and 21^st Century Skills

Use high order thinking skills for your projects:

1.       Analyze

2.       Evaluate

3.       Create

Ask students to synthesize and evaluate during the project, not report the project, think deeper; this will help the students learn better and become better thinkers. 

 

21^st Century Literacies

This means that we must prepare our students to do be literate in the 21^st century.  This does not stop at the ability to read and write, we are a technology world now and our students must be able to use technology in an efficient way.  Being aware of technology and being literate in it allow our students to be independent, aware, and productive citizens of the country, and will contribute to society in a meaningful and helpful way.  I liked how the teacher from Canada worded it; “We want our students to be information artists. Can they find information, assess whether it’s good or bad, deal with raw data,……” (p. 50).  This is completely true of what we need from our students.  They are surrounded by information and have the ability to always have access to information, so as teachers, we must teach them how to do this and then what to do with the information they have found. 

 

Essential Learning Functions:

1.       Ubiquity: look for tools that will help students be more mobile and learn wherever and whenever they want. 

2.       Deep Learning: help students find and make sense of the raw information.  Primary sources are a great way to get students involved in this as are the databases. 

3.       Making things visible and discussable: one of the first steps in making the conversation going is to make the ideas visible.  A few ways to do this is by using: Google Earth, FreeMind Mindmapper, and a Visual Thesaurus. 

4.       Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community: one way to do this in your classroom, school, and/or community is to have blogs, social software, virtual meetings, ect. 

5.       Collaboration: a great way to collaborate is by doing projects, it causes people to community and think and share ideas with one another. 

6.       Research: projects nowadays all involve research (for the most part) and most people use the internet to find their information and research. 

7.       Project Management: this helps students manage their time, sources, work, drafts, feedback, and products.  This is a skill that our kids need to be learning and a project is a great way to teach them this skill. 

8.       Reflection and Iteration: Blogs are a great way to reflect and go back through the entire process of a project and look and reflect on your process.