Reflection #4

1. (1) Long on activity, short on learning outcomes: not worth investing you or your students’ time. A project should be “right sized”. Lean toward where an idea can form and not fall short of what you are trying to teach.

(2) Technology layered over traditional practice: don’t have student’s research and present their findings on a power point. Connect students to rich data and primary sources which creating high quality learning products.

(3) Trivial thematic units: go beyond the relation of a lesson with the outside world. Provide students with the opportunity to look into the lesson with history and solid facts by interviewing people involved or polling classmates.

(4) Overly scripted with many, many steps: discrete steps and predictable results.

2. 

• Loosely designed with the possibility of different learning paths
• ·      Generative, causing students to construct meaning
• ·      Center on a driving question and structured for inquiry
• ·      Student interest within real life experiences
• ·      Realistic and cross multiple disciplines
• ·      Reach beyond school to involve others
• ·      Tap rich data
• ·      Structure
• ·      Have students working as inquiring experts might
• ·      21^st-century skills and literacies, communication, risk-taking, confidence, resilience, self-reflection, cooperation
• ·      Learn by DOING

3.

• ·      Projects produced by other teachers
• ·      News stories
• ·      Contemporary issues
• ·      Student questions or interests
• ·      Educational use
• ·      “Mashup” of a great idea and new tool.
• ·      One good project will lead you to another

4. (1) revisit framework: Learning objectives, 21ts-skills included, identify learning dispositions: persistence and reflection.

(2) Evidence of understanding. How would the students be different as learners and as individuals?

(3) What would students inquire about, do, create? “Optimal ambiguity,” True-to-life connections.

(4) What is the first thing you are going to say to get students interested? What will motivate your students?

5. Weather monitoring isn’t the most fun thing in the world. In order to get students interested, we need to make the activities fun and exciting. Explore all kinds of possibilities that students would be interested in. We plan on focusing around Hurricane Sandy, therefore we can include weather monitoring in to our lives and have students research and talk to people who were affected by the hurricane and who is involved with the organizations toward donating to those who were affected.