Group items tagged

What time allotment will be given to the project? Will this project be conducted during the entire school day or during dedicated blocks of time? How many days will be devoted to the project?

Also, allow students to go in new directions, but guide them when they appear to digress from the project.

Facilitate the process and the love of learning. Teach the students how to work collaboratively. Designate fluid roles for group members. Have students choose their primary roles, but assume responsibility and interactivity for all group roles. Remind them that every part of the process belongs to each individual and needs each student's total involvement. Provide resources and guidance. Assess the process by creating team and project rubrics.

Team rubrics state the expectations of each team member: Watch the group dynamics. How well are the members participating? How engaged are they in the process? Assess the outcome. Project rubrics, on the other hand, ask these questions: What is required for project completion? What is the final product: A document? A multimedia presentation? A poster? A combination of products? What does a good report, multimedia presentation, poster, or other product look like? Make the requirements clear to the students so they can all meet with success.

Discovery Education (13) offers a great resource; a collection of assessment rubrics and graphic organizers (14) that may be helpful to you as you create your own.

When a student's assessment and the teacher's assessment don't agree, schedule a student-teacher conference to let the student explain in more detail his or her understanding of the content and justify the outcome.

devise a plan that will integrate as many subjects as possible into the project.

PosterMyWall (4) is a fantastic tool for creating artistic, high-quality posters (5), collages, photo calendars and/or photo cards that can either be shared online or printed out and inexpensively shipped home.

PosterMyWall is slightly restricted in terms of the amount of options available for customization (mostly pictures and text), but other services, such as Glogster (6), offer a wider range of options.

Screencast-o-matic (7) is a powerful screen recorder that allows users to capture anything (8) happening on their screen, as well as voice and video from the webcam for up to 15 minutes in the recorder's free version.

Some high-quality alternatives to Screencast-o-matic are Jing (9) and Ezvid (10), both of which are very powerful and offer unique features.

Padlet (11) is another free program that facilitates the creation of virtual walls (12) where students and teachers can post sticky notes with almost anything they want.

Other similar sites are Linoit (13) or NoteApp (14).

With the sheer amount of content that children are expected to learn, it can be tempting to plaster every inch of wall space with some sort of display.  This is a mistake.  Children can only attend to so much from the environment around them before working memory is overloaded.