• What is the point of a good project? A good project focuses on getting to the “heart of a discipline.” At the end of the project you should want your students to know the big ideas and concepts.
• Why the public curriculum doesn't work? When teachers use a textbook all the students get out of the learning is what someone else has picked out for them. As a teacher you don’t have much say in what is taught using a public curriculum.
• Why projects? “Projects are highly contextual”. Projects are designed for the students based on things they want to learn.
Learning Dispositions
• Learning dispositions are not something that can’t be taught. They are characteristics that come from within the student and arise also from their learning environment such characteristics as “confidence, curiosity, resourcefulness, cooperation, motivation, persistence and courage”. By tapping into these student characteristics during projects encourages students to be more well rounded learners.
Keep your students in mind
• Your students could be sitting in your class thinking “This is so boring. Why do we have to learn this?” A teacher needs to be creative and keep this thought in mind in order to keep their interest and curiosity while teaching. When students become interested and engaged in a topic learning and understanding deepens.
Essential learning functions
• Ubiquity – immersion of all type of technical tools
• Deep learning- going beyond what’s there and looking deeper into a subject.
• Making Things Visible and Discuss-able- being able to actually show examples of something instead of just talking about them.
• Expressing Ourselves, Sharing Ideas, Building Community- connecting info with the use of social medium through all types of Web based tools.
• Research- Broad range of Web sources to acquire information about a subject. It is important for students to use the helpful tools such as ASK for kids to decipher research information.
• Project Management: Planning and Organization-ways of organizing time, materials, sources to help students become more successful learners during a project.
• Reflection and Iteration- Blogs and journaling during a project to be able to look back on past and present ideas and facts for improving a project.
Karleann,
ReplyDeleteYou had mentioned some really great points regarding keeping students interested and engaged. I agree everyone has had a time where we were sitting in class wondering why we have to learn this. This is why it is so important for teachers to be clear in explaining the goal of any project/lesson. Too many times students don’t make that connection, which leads to not understanding the relevance of the material being presented. Teachers need to incorporate hands-on learning like PBL to make it a long-term memory of learning, rather than whizzing through material and forgetting.
Allison Burt
I really like how you mentioned that learning dispositions come from within the student themselves. It is a different point of view than the way I thought of it. I also think it is important that you mentioned keeping your students involved and interested in the material.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you mentioned that the teacher needs to be creative. This is something I think over time teachers forget and fall into a rut. Something that is beneficial to project based learning is that it can keep teachers and students fresh because it keeps them up to date and thinking with the times as we keep moving forward.
ReplyDelete