Group items tagged

ating Essential Questions (07:01) Coming up with an essential question (also called a guiding or driving question) is one of the first key steps in designing a project. For a fun tool to help craft effective driving questions, check out BIE's "tubric."

BIE's Project Planner Tutorial (02:02) BIE offers a powerul and simple online tool, the Project Planner, for organizing your ideas while putting together a project. You must sign up for a free account, but you can save and print your work to your profile.

Tips For Building Projects (06:17) The audio is a little low on this teacher-produced screen-capture video, but it does a great job outlining the basics things you should be thinking about in your initial project planning stages.

Think Forward: Assessment (07:26) Assessment for project-based learning requires a more comprehensive approach. The poor audio quality is worth it, to hear real teachers describe exactly how they assess for learning throughout a project. From Manor New Tech High School's Think Forward PBL Institute.

roblem-Based Learning for the 21st Century Classroom (05:22) This nice overview from ASCD goes into some of the obstacles to project-based learning, and then shows teachers sharing strategies for addressing those challenges.

cheduling for Project-Based Learning (05:35) Three high school teachers talk about how they re-structured their day to accommodate integrated PBL. Not everyone has the flexibility shown here, but it's fascinating to see how these teachers broke it down.

How PBLU Works (01:15) Hungry for more lessons on PBL? PBLU is an incredible resource offered by BIE. See how you can access two-week training courses and Common-Core-aligned projects that you can modify and customize.

hen students arrived on the first day of school they found an empty classroom. The first project Terronez asked his students to undertake was designing their own learning space, one that would support experience-based, collaborative learning.

Terronez asked his students to design an iPod app that would solve a real-world problem. They came up with an idea, designed the display icon, figured out how users would navigate the app, prototyped sample tabs, then pitched their mock-up to an audience.

In a project exploring air pressure, Terronez’s students built their own hovercrafts using a leaf blower as the engine. When the hovercrafts worked, the students designed 3D representations of themes from “Freedom Fighters,” a Discovery School education video about racial struggles featuring the stories of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. Their creations were featured in a hovercraft parade on Election Day.

Take a look at High Tech High art teacher Jeff Robin’s video explaining the difference between project-oriented learning and project-based learning.

What might students do in such schools, in the absence of prescribed subjects? They might work together in diverse teams to build robots, roller coasters, gardens, and human-powered submarines. They might write and publish a guide to the fauna and history of a nearby estuary, or an economics text illustrated with original woodcuts, or a children's astronomy book. They might produce original films, plays, and spoken word events on adolescent issues, Japanese internment, cross-border experiences, and a host of other topics. They might mount a crime scene exhibition linking art history and DNA analysis, or develop a museum exhibit of World War I as seen from various perspectives. They might celebrate returning warriors, emulating the bard in Beowulf, by interviewing local veterans and writing poems honoring their experiences. The possibilities are endless.

Changing the subject, then, means deriving the curriculum from the lived experience of the student. In this view, rather than a collection of fixed texts, the curriculum is more like a flow of events, accessible through tools that help students identify and extract rich academic content from the world: guidelines and templates for project development, along with activities and routines for observation and analysis, reflection, dialogue, critique, and negotiation.

The Museum Box site allows you to build  an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Students can display anything from a text file to a movie. My students will be using this platform to argue their thesis, rather than writing a traditional essay.

My students have started designing our curriculum units. Seriously. While transitioning to our current unit, we discussed the possibilities as a class.

Before the technology/constructivist shift in my classsroom, I would have taught all of this quite traditionally. We’d read books, answer questions, and then address those questions in class. I’d lecture a lot, with supplemental grammar lessons here and there, and I’d include some type of artistic project to achieve viewing and representing objectives. The whole design would have been extremely teacher centered. And at the end of it all, I’d hope they learned something about writing and thinking. Instead, inquiry and technology are a natural part of our English classes.

Are you a Google Drive / Google Docs fan? Do you take notes, compose papers, construct spreadsheets, and build presentations in real-time on the web while collaborating with others? I’m not necessarily promoting Google Drive; just merely pointing out a few of the powerful ways the free tool can help you save time and keep you better organized.