Group items tagged

In the course of projects and project-based learning units, reflection should be an important part. Students can reflect in any number of ways, but this post from MSU's own Leigh Graves Wolf offers a way to use Google Docs as a powerful reflection tool. The "developer's notebook," as she calls it, offers a doorway for the instructor to the thought processes and ideas of the student during the course of the project. In this case it was an instructional model being developed in a graduate level course, but the principles of this notebook can be easily scaled back to a secondary level course. This post even offers a tutorial of how to implement such a feature in your course. 

This post from the Google for Students blog is a great introduction to how to manage group communication and deadlines as a member of the group using Gmail and Calendar labs and tricks, but these tips can also be used for teachers looking to manage and assign groups for projects. The author recommends creating a contact group for each member of the group and creating a shared calendar with those addresses. Teachers can use these same grouping features in Gmail to easily communicate with whole classes. For example, I might want to send an email to my first block English students but not any of the other blocks - I can easily do this by grouping those students in a "Contact Group." I can then share the class calendar with them and filter their emails using Gmail filters. And the organizations and taxonomies can go deeper from there.

This is a more research-heavy link about integrating web 2.0 tools, like Google Apps, into a project-based learning environment. It's a heavy read, but offers a lot of deeper thinking around the concept of PBL and some great bibliographic resources. One of the most intriguing parts of the paper for me was the distinction made between what constitutes a web 2.0 tool versus a web 2.0 activity, which should guide us in the way we implement Google Apps. Should these just be replacements for traditional, 20th century activities (ie: a Google Site becoming a digital poster-board project), or should our decision to implement these tools be something more? This is the quote making said distinction: "From this definition web 2.0 is understood as a set of technologies, but also as a range of activities with certain characteristics. In this way we can distinguish between web 2.0 technologies or resources as e.g. blogs, microblogs and podcasts and then web 2.0 activities or practices such as blogging, podcasting, and micro-blogging. This distinction has been further explored by Dohn (2009) who has defined web 2.0 as a range of activities or practices, rather than technologies, which she characterises in the following way [10]: 1) collaboration and/or distributed authorship, 2) active, open-access, "bottom-up" participation and interactive multi-way communication, 3) continuous production, reproduction, and transformation of material in use and reuse across contexts, 4) openness of content, renunciation of copyright, distributed ownership, 5) lack of finality, "awareness in practice" of the "open-endedness" of the activity, 6) taking place on WWW, or to a large extent utilizing web -mediated resources and activities."

The author here discusses some ways to use tools in Google Apps to standardize some of the project-based learning process. This post is one in a series about Google Apps and PBL and you can find others by selecting posts in the author's "Google Apps" categoy. I'm not a fan of standardization, but when it comes to managing the PBL process, some useful forms and templates are great to have. One she mentions is a "team task sheet" for planning each member's role in the project as well as observation, question, and research forms. This post deals with using Google Sites not just as a replacement for the usual "project poster," but as a more living space for the PBL group and its project.