Chandler School

Padlet as a simple blogging platform:

Padlet Mini as a bookmarking tool:

Padlet as a KWL chart:

Polls, chat tools, and interactive quizzes provide good ways to hear from all of the students in a classroom. These kind of tools allow shy students to ask questions and share comments. For your more outspoken students who want to comment on everything, a feedback mechanism provides a good outlet for them too. Here's a run-down of some of the best tools for gathering feedback from students in real-time.

The overall theme of this teacher-tested unit is using maps to understand borders and their impacts in Europe. The materials will help your middle school students to use maps to think about how borders intersect physical and human geographical features, and how those intersections can lead to cooperation and/or conflict.

There are many dimensions of student achievement that we need to evaluate in PBL. The end product is certainly important, but if we focus only on that, the meaningful learning that happens throughout the process can be lost as students feel pressure to do whatever it takes to "make the grade."

In other words, we want to acknowledge not only what they learned, but how they came to learn it so that they can use these processes in the future.

Establish target goals early to provide purpose for the project, while also establishing expectations of the result: What is the problem to solve or the product to create? What kinds of subject area content need to be included or addressed in the project? What expectations do you have for the final product's presentation, publishing, or performance? What kinds of collaborative behaviors must be demonstrated by students throughout the process? Feedback and corrections should happen frequently to keep students on track, improve their work, and set them up for success in the final product. Waiting too long to give feedback may result in work that is too far gone to be fixed or improved.

What were the bright spots of the project? Have you asked students for feedback? What will they remember most about their learning experience? What seemed hardest for them? Were they engaged all the way through? If not, can you pinpoint when and why their interest waned? Were you able to scaffold the experience so that all learners could be successful? What would you change if you were to do this project again?

What's the right line between teacher direction and student freedom? Is it OK for students to swerve toward new questions -- unanticipated by the teacher -- that grab their curiosity? How open is too open?

This formula -- the introduction of a thinking routine to stimulate observations and questions at the beginning of each new topic, the formulation of an inquiry-based investigation from those observations and questions, and the subsequent rounds of writing, critique, and rewriting -- essentially became the working formula for the rest of the school year.

Working through guided projects can help students to develop the skills that they need to further explore creatively.  It’s true that some students can just figure it out, but most need that gentle push to get them started.

Following patterns to the letter when I first got started helped me to learn the skills that I needed to be creative in my knitting.

The problem comes when all we ever do are guided projects.  Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager warn against the “20 identical birdhouses” style class projects, where there is zero creativity involved.  It’s very easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on standards, rubrics and guided projects and zapping all the fun and creativity out, turning a makerspace into nothing more than another classroom.  It’s tempting for many educators to just print out a list of instructions, sit students down in front of a “maker kit” and check their e-mail while students work through the steps one by one.  This is obviously not what we want in our makerspaces.