She planned to keep reworking it, applying layers of acrylic until she got the play of light just the way she wanted. Then she laughed and said, “You should see what’s underneath! I bet there are three or four versions beneath this one.”
Not only was the student producing a lovely painting — which would one day grace her family’s living room — but she was paying close attention to her learning process. At the end of each class, she added a short reflection to her project journal, which she was keeping on a Google Doc shared with her teacher.
As I listened to this student describe her learning experience, however, it seemed that the more meaningful assessment was happening long before the project came to a close.
Encourage students to make self-assessment a habit, too. Invite students to request workshops or mini-lessons in areas where they want more help. One PBL teacher reserves a corner of the class whiteboard for just this purpose. Use journals or blogs to encourage goal-setting, self-assessment and reflection throughout a project.
For the Spring 2009 Digital Ethnography course led by Michael Wesch. This is a compilation of trailers created by students for their Spring 2009 projects. For more information about our project, visit our research hub: http://www.netvibes.com/wesch There you will find links to student blogs, our wiki, our diigo links, notes, and other materials.
A free computer game for teenagers created with the help of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has made its online debut. "Supreme Decision," the first of several planned web-based games, went online in August as part of a project called Our Courts. In it, students can play a Supreme Court law clerk helping a justice with a tie-breaking vote over a First Amendment case. Backed by the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and Georgetown University, the Our Courts project is designed to teach middle school students about the Constitution and the courts. O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, has said more people can name an "American Idol" judge than the three branches of government. Besides teaching about civics, she hopes the Our Courts project will help students learn how to analyze problems and develop arguments. In "Supreme Decision," students play a law clerk and must help fictional Justice Irene Waters write the majority opinion on whether a school can ban students from wearing music band T-shirts. Another game, called "Do I Have a Right," will be released soon. In that game, students will play the director of a constitutional law firm who must decide which amendment resolves a problem posed by a client.
Thank you, Jennifer, for sharing your process on digital storytelling. I teach middle school English and am not as tech-savvy as you, but I know the value of a well-planned multimedia project for students. I am inspired to plan out a similar project, now that I see how to do it. I like that they create a storyboard and script to emphasize the "meat" of their project and not the glitzy stuff. Their narrated videos are quite impressive. Your students are lucky to have you!
Thanks Irene! The students did such an amazing job. You really don't have to be tech-saavy to employ this in your classroom. The software is already so user-friendly. The person who taught me how to do this was an English teacher - she would use it with poetry, so that students would have to emphasize emotion in their reading. Very effective!
Jennifer, this is wonderful! I love how you give your students choices of which app to use and how you place the onus on them to learn it and to troubleshoot on their own. This is something that I teach in my computer classes because students have to acquire and feel comfortable with that skill. Thanks!
I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags.
I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.
for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.
All students should master a verifiable set of skills, but not necessarily the same skills. Part of the reason high schools fail so many kids is that educators can’t get free of the notion that all students—regardless of their career aspirations—need the same basic preparation. States are piling on academic courses, removing the arts, and downplaying career and technical education to make way for a double portion of math. Meanwhile, career-focused programs, such as Wisconsin’s youth apprenticeships and well-designed career academies, are engaging students and raising their post-high-school earnings, especially among hard-to-reach, at-risk male students.
Maintaining our one-size-fits-all approach will hurt many of the kids we are trying most to help. Maybe that approach, exemplified in the push for common standards, will simply lead to yet more unmet education goals. But it won’t reduce, and might increase, the already high rate at which students drop out of school, or graduate without the skills and social behaviors required for career success.
Well-written commentary for anyone interested in the impact of Common Core Standards.
"What's Wrong With the Common-Standards Project"
"We need rigorous but basic academics, homing in on skills that will be used, and not short-shrifting the "soft skill" behaviors that lead to success in college and careers. The management guru Peter Drucker got it right: "The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work 10 years later."
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
assigning a pool of points for a team, say 40 points for four students, and having the students divide the points up depending on who did which percentage of the work, was effective in raising students’ participation in a group project.
the students realize that there is a tangible effect if they do not do their work.
Another, very quantifiable, way of discerning and holding students accountable for what they accomplish during group writing/projects is using Google Drive to track participation.
What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include?
This isn't a complete answer, but one thing the very first introductory classes should require is that the students turn off all their electronic computers and actually learn to walk through algorithms with a computer that exists only on paper. (Or, I suppose, a whiteboard or a simulator.) This exercise would give the students a grounding in what is going on inside the computer as a very low level.My first computer programming class in my Freshman year of high school was completely on paper. Although it was done because the school didn't have much money, it turned out to be very beneficial.Another class I had in high school, that wouldn't normally be lumped into a Computer Science curriculum but has been a boon to my career, was good old Typing 101.
If you followed the CS Unplugged curriculum your students would know more about CS than most CS grads:http://csunplugged.orgIt's a really great intro to basic computer science concepts and very easy for students to understand. Best of all you don't even need a computer per student if your school doesn't have the budget,
For younger students, I think that the ability to make something professional-looking, like a real grown-up would, is paramount. Sadly, I think this means that LOGO and BASIC aren't much use any more*.
So, we have a few choices. You can try to write phone apps that look just like real phone apps, design interactive websites that look just like real interactive websites, or do something with embedded systems / robotics. Avoid the temptation to make these things into group projects; the main thing every student needs to experience is the process of writing code, running it, debugging it, and watching the machine react to every command.
It is important to consider what an 11 to 18-year old is familiar with in terms of mathematics and logical thinking. An average 11-year old is probably learning about fractions, simple cartesian geometry, the concept of units, and mathematical expressions. By 15, the average student will be taking algebra, and hopefully will have the all-important concept of variables under his/her belt. So much in CS is dependent on solid understanding that symbols and tokens can represent abstract concepts, values, or algorithms. Without it, it's still possible to teach CS, but it must be done in a very different way (see Scratch).
At this point, concepts such as variables, parenthesis matching, and functions (of the mathematical variety) are within easy reach. Concepts like parameter passing, strings and collections, and program flow should be teachable. More advanced concepts such as recursion, references and pointers, certain data structures, and big-O may be very difficult to teach without first going through some more foundational math.
I tend to agree strongly with those that believe a foundational education should inspire interest and enforce concepts and critical thinking over teaching any specific language, framework, system, or dogma.
The key is that the concepts in CS aren't just there for the hell of it. Everything was motivated by a real problem, and few things are more satisfying than fixing something you really want to work with a cool technique or concept you just learned.
Great resource for teachers (especially those of us not initially trained in Computer Science) about what should 'count' as Computer Science. Worth the read!
grew out of developing national network of Latino-serving charter schools; 2002 had 12 Early College High Schools in the US - all schools serve low-income students; seven serve adjudicated/overage students; seven serve over 25% English-language-learner (ELL) students and over 10% special education students. All have open enrollment policies.
Micro-student loans for students in 3rd world countries.
Outside of the United States and a handful of other countries, student loans just don't exist. No matter how well you did in school, no matter how good your grades were, no matter how hard you worked, if you don't have the cash up front or a rich uncle to co-sign for you, you just can't go to college. In many cases, Vittana loans are the first and only source of college loans for students in countries where we operate.
"Project MASH is a social learning experience that challenges teachers and students to DESIGN stuff, MAKE stuff, and PLAY stuff, to ACT and WRITE, CREATE and EXPLORE. PROJECT MASH bridges the divide between learning in and out of school, from making and tinkering in the classroom to citizen science in the backyard, from design thinking challenges to contests in creative expression."
Sponsored by Pearson Foundation
Within our project design, reflection is a key element that helps us support students as they work to understand the why, what, and how of their learning within the project.
This project included the development of a business game which was tested by students and teachers on two campuses. It contributed to improving the practicality and accessibility of mobile learning tools which can be used to improve engagement and achievement of undergraduate students in business and related disciplines.
A working mobile-learning business game using location-aware augmented reality was developed to support teaching business-related concepts and skills. The open-source application is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlearngame/. It provides a business game toolset that can be used by any tertiary provider without major investment in time or technology.
by ‘Making Thinking Visible’ (MTV) can help here. MTV strategies offer two advantages to teachers and learners. Importantly they provide structure to thinking and encourage a deeper engagement with concepts and ideas. They also allow the thinking that is occurring to be made visible and thus a part of the assessment process
mastery of the process that students are utilising as they solve the problems they encounter in their making. How do they deal with obstacles? How did they plan their solution? How effectively do they collaborate? What did they do to understand the problem and how did they monitor their progress?
Students move through phases of thinking that include empathy, needs analysis, ideation, planning, prototyping and evaluation in patterns both linear and non-linear as needs require.
Failing is a part of the process and failing disrupts output based assessments. At the core of the maker philosophy is a process of ideation, iteration and emergence.
their Personal Passion Projects. Many of the projects fit neatly into the description of maker-centered learning. These are the projects where the students have identified a need and the solution is a product which they design and then prototype.
The maker movement and with it maker-centered learning brings new possibilities and challenges into the classroom. It has spawned makerspaces and students are busy designing and making products. The danger with all this frenzied making is that it is very easy to miss the point, to focus on the product and not the journey.
Intel offers free, easily integrated tools and teaching resources to support collaborative student-centered learning. Our online thinking tools provide active learning places where students can engage in robust discussions, analyze complex information, pursue investigations, and solve problems. You'll also find teaching resources such as exemplary lesson plans, assessment strategies, and technology-enriched project ideas for all K-12 subjects. Developed by educators, these free tools and resources support 21st century learning, with project-based approaches in the classroom.
It is interesting to work with students to make a film in our classroom. Eduhowto Over begun to transform the class into a project-based classroom. This constructivist approach incorporates technology into the classroom.
Animated Videos Fun and free services for creating short animated videos. Screencasting Use these services to create demonstration videos on your computer. Useful for teachers and students. Documentary Video In this section we'll look at some free services for creating documentary- style slideshow- based videos. Pages 11-21 Finding Images and Audio for Video Projects. Use these resources to locate images and sounds that you and your students can use in video projects. Pages 3-7 Page 26
