Reflection #4

1.            Discuss the potential pitfalls in project design.

The potential pitfalls in project design include not having quality projects while using the technology, not being the “right size”, having themes that do not get the students to be more collaborative and think differently about it, and being overly scripted with too many steps.

2.            Discuss the features of a good project.

The features of a good project include the following qualities:

-Loosely designed with the possibility of different learning paths

-Generative, causing students to construct meaning

-Centered on driving questions

-Realistic, and cross multiple disciplines

-Reach beyond school to involve others

-Tap rich data or primary sources

-Have students working as inquiring experts might

-Students learn by doing

-Learn 21^st century skills

-Structured to learn with and from each other

3.            Discuss where project ideas come from.

Project ideas are everywhere and can be found just by looking around. They can also be found in the classroom and from learning by others as well.

4.            Discuss the steps to design a project.

The steps of designing a project are to revisit the framework, establish evidence of understanding, plan the project theme or challenge, and plan entrée into the project experience.

5.            Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

Concepts in this chapter can relate to our topic/project in many different ways. We are reminding students how to design a project and where they are coming up with ideas. Also, having the students really be engaged and use technology to be successful in their project.

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.

Reflection #3

Reflection 3:

1. Discussion on what should be considered in finding the "big idea" for a project.

The "big idea" is what you want your students to get from the overall project or idea. This would be the teacher’s reflecting on the main concept that they will be teaching and want the students to learn. Making sure you set up and relate the project to the real world will really help to get children involved and working towards that one goal.

2. Discussion on the 21st century skills.

Twenty-first century skills are important and becoming more and more popular in education. Using 21^st century skills will really help the students develop new ideas and think outside the box. The project they would be working on would evolve with these skills and the higher thinking allows the students to analyze, evaluate, and create.

3. Discussion on the 21st century literacies.

There is so much for the students to learn in this category and they used the NETS-S to address the students’ creativity, communication, and collaboration in the classroom. Literacies are important and crucial for the students to learn and become more independent with their skills that they choose to incorporate.

4. Discussion on each of the essential learning functions.

-Ubiquilty:  This gives the students the opportunity to learn any time, through a lot of different tools. They are able to be mobile and learn wherever they may be.

 -Deep learning- Deeper learning allows students to really engage themselves in their work and sort the information.

-Making things visible and discussable- Using a picture to learn the information and prove that it is correct.

-Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community- Sharing what they have come up with and also share and learn from others.

-Collaboration-– Allowing students to learn and teach from each other, and also expanding their own ideas.

-Research- Students usually turn towards the internet for research and they can organize and save their work as they go.

-Project Management - This helps students manage time, work, and being bale to work on it at multiple places.

-Reflection and iteration- Learning to view your own work how others may see it and give yourself feedback on what you may want to change or fix.

5. Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

Twenty-first century skills are very important to our project because we are also using this type of technology to complete our own project. We keep learning new tools and websites that I have never even heard before, but are a great help towards our project and work skills.

1. Discussion on what should be considered in finding the "big idea" for a project.

The "big idea" is what you want your students to get from the project or lesson your teaching. So you want to find the main point of what your teaching. so after you find your over arching concepts for your students you want to reflect on why these particular concepts are important. From this you start thinking about application and relevance to the real world. In this chapter they focus a lot on is the topic relevant to your students. I like one of the examples in the book, a teacher in a fishing communities has his students write a letter, which is an ordinary assignment, to the Minister of Fisheries because this topic is one they would commonly hear discussed at the dinner table (p.45).

2. Discussion on the 21st century skills.

I like that there is a focus on how the project will help the students develop 21st century skills. This portion talks about Blooms taxonomy and how your project can evolve using the higher order thinking skills in it. For example in the Analyze section, students will investigate, classify and prioritize, in the Evaluate section, students will judge, defend, recommend and assess. these skills are critical in any student succeeding in our time.

3. Discussion on the 21st century literacies.

The new NETS-S came out and specifically addressed creativity, innovation, communication, and collaboration among other things. There is so much to this category but i lied how the book put it, "literacy boils down to learning to be independent, aware and productive citizens"( p.49).  its all about how we facilitate our students learning about information, the tools they use, the outlines and rubrics, all of this is the basic literacy skills that are critical.

4. Discussion on each of the essential learning functions.

-Ubiquilty: learning inside and outside of the classroom, and all the time. -This gives the students the opportunity to learn any time, through handheld devices like mobile phones and even gps devices. Tools that help students be more mobile and learn wherever they want.

-Deep learning- Deeper thinking happens when students have to navigate, sort and analyze information. 

-Making things visible and discussable- I like the phrase showing rather than telling, and a picture is worth a thousand words. these describes this learning function. Examples of visual representation are Google Earth, and Flickr.

-Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community- With all the social media there are so may ways students can express themselves.

-Collaboration-teaching and learning with others- projects in general invite collaboration, some tools are wikis, survey tools and learning exchanges.

-Research- For most research projects students turn to the Internet.

-project management:planning and organization- this helps students manage time, work, sources, feedback from others and drafts. different folders serve as good organizational techniques.

-Reflection and iteration- Reconsidering and reshaping help facilitate deeper learning.

5. Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

21st century skills are very important to our project, because we are using 21st century technology to do our projects. we are using different computer based software's to complete the different projects we have, like the concept map and the virtual pen pal, those are technologies i hadn't used before but now i know how to use them.

Reading Reflection #3

Discussion on what should be considered in finding “the Big Idea” for a project.

Page 45 states: "After you identify the overarching concepts and processes you want your students to understand, reflect on why these concepts are important." Applying what you want your students to learn with real life is one of the first steps to finding the "Big Idea" for a project. "Who cares about this? Who does it touch?" is the next step. Being able to tie in people from the real world rather than just school is a way to grab students' attention. When it comes to a project that offers value to their community, they are more willing to do the project and are more invested in learning. 

Discussion on the 2lst Century skills.

Coming from Bloom's Taxonomy:

(Knowledge, Comprehension, Synthesis)

(1) Analyze: examine, explain, investigate, characterize, classify,compare, deduce, differentiate, discriminate, illustrate, prioritize.

(2) Evaluate: judge, select, decide, justify, verify, improve, defend, debate, convince, recommend, assess.

(3) Create: adapt, anticipate, combine, compose, invent, design, imagine, propose, theorize, formulate.

(4) Develop criteria, compare, justify.

- Students will understand what you want then to as long as your project is well designed and organized. Thinking beyond subject mastery to the important skills, attitudes, and habits of mind your project might involve (pg.47).

Discussion on the 21st Century literacies.

Learning to be independent is the 21st Century Literacies number one goal. To be independent while being aware and productive to those who are around you (in any circumstance). Using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts help the ability of literacy. Communication and collaboration also influences this knowledge which also supports individual learning.

Discussion on each of the essential learning functions.

(1) Ubiquity: Learning, Inside and Outside the Classroom, and All the time.

- Providing the opportunity for students to learn anywhere at any given time. Finding tools that will encourage this PBL and ubiquity will help students learn wherever and whenever they want to learn. 

- i.e Cell Phones, Web Applications, Google Docs, Flickr.

(2) Deep Learning

- Go beyond filtered information and help students make sense of raw information. Students need to learn how to have a higher-order of thinking. In order to do so, they would need to achieve the goals of these skills: navigating, sorting, organizing, analyzing, and making graphical representations. 

- i. e Video On Demand, real-time data sets, Primary Source Archives. 

(3) Making Things Visible and Discussable

- For those are are visual learners; making things visible help students have a better understanding of what they are learning about. Examining things such as historical artifacts, experimenting with science, expressing ideas through photography or film. "A picture is worth a thousand words." 

- i. e Visual Thesaurus, Google Earth, Flickr, FreeMind Mindmapper.

(4) Expressing Ourselves, Sharing Ideas, Building Community

- Personal interaction through using the internet has broadened the learning ability of many students. Facebook, Myspace, Instant messenger...using things like these in the classroom to help students communicate with one another is such a great idea.

- I know a professor who uses Twitter during his lecture; allowing students to ask questions or comment on things he is saying without having to raise their hand to speak aloud if they aren't much of a public speaker (or for other reasons). This gives a reason for students to come to class and want to learn something. They are using technology that they use in every day life in the classroom! Such a great idea.

(5) Collaboration: Teaching and Learning with Others

- Using universal technologies to communicate and learn with others. 

- i. e Skype or any other shared application.

(6) Research

- In order for students to learn how to research, they need to be taught was is valid information and what is not. Just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean it's true! 

- Citation Machine, ASK for Kids.

(7) Project Management: Planning and Organization

- Allows students to manage time, work, sources, feedback, drafts, and products during projects. Certain folders for certain things, having a homepage ready for use. 

- Desire 2 Learn, Moodle, iGoogle

(8) Reflection and Iteration

- Examining all sides and all points of view. 

- TUMBLR is a really good example of this. Those of you who do not know what it is, it's basically a blog site where people from all over the world are able to share thoughts and feelings with one another. I post to this blog every day, mostly pictures about what I usually dream about: traveling, Harry Potter, my favorite bands, fashion...anything! I follow people from all over the world that share the same interests with me. It's a great way to pass time or to learn about other countries with out being in school. Learning on your own terms is a great way to express your learning style and your ability to learn on your own.  

Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

- Time management is really important for our project. Having things due at a certain time throughout the semester really helps with being able to control what we do and how well we do it. 

- Communication: We use out phones to text each other to keep each other up to date on what we are doing for the project. 

- We have been researching information to help us learn more about Weather Monitoring. 

- We have been creating multiple visuals that help us and outsiders understand what it is we are trying to teach and/or present. 

Virtual Penpal

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CBBR2Q98LZV3X04tqzYqr-LhzWkWKw0lb0shRn-yCco/edit?usp=sharing

Hurricane Katrina Fundraiser (Concept Map Part A)