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David Ogilvie

PBL Guide_Project-Based Learning - 1 views

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    This document is a resource produced for Instructors and Coordinators related to the National Academy Foundation. It is a comprehensive overview of PBL that highlights the difference between activities vs. projects. It clarifies what PBL is vs. other forms of learning, and identifies what needs to be in place in order to complete technology-based projects. The use of Project-based Learning in the classroom also allows for the promotion of 'best practices' for classroom instruction as identified by the Foundation. The article clearly distinguishes between projects vs. activities. Types of work are presented, along with best opportunities to use PBL. The importance of many conditions being in place to support PBL cannot be underemphasised; as these may include the classroom and school environments, the community as well as parent involvement. The article presents published evidence and research that support Project-based Learning and the inquiry process. Many of the resources presented also include links to various groups and agencies that promote PBL, including The Buck Institute and the George Lucas Educational Foundation mentioned by Peter Skillen during our course on January 18th. The article discusses good project design including six powerful features of PBL (The Six A's) that should be present in all good projects, and concludes with a page of key student scaffolds to ensure project delivery. An aseptic, fact based article, but full of good, clear examples and links.
Peter Skillen

Tech2Learn - Project-Based Learning - 0 views

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    Brenda's PBL page on her wiki. Great resources for many topics.
Susan Hersey

Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age by Mitchel Resnick - 0 views

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    In the article, "Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age", Mitchel Resnick compares digital media with the creative interactive aspects of fingerpaint rather than the passive absorption of television. Like Eleanor Duckworth's article, "Helping Students Get to Where Ideas Can Find Them" he states, " that learning is an active process... people don't get ideas; they make them". To do this, he says we need to rethink how people learn with new technologies to take advantage of what these technologies can offer that older technologies could not. Learners need opportunities to become fluent with these new technology tools so that they can construct and create with them. He speaks about Computer Clubhouses as places that offer learners mentors to support them in a project based learning environment focused on the learner's interests. The creative process is the structure that uses new technology tools to actualize a significant creation. The Computer Clubhouse approach has clear connections to the two-fold approach mentioned in Duckworth 's article as well. Resnick recognizes that everything evolves; even new technologies are changing more to reflect the users of them and the purposes for them. The programable bricks sold as MindStorms is an example. He continues with stating the need to reform education with cross-curricular subject integration, grouping students by project interest rather than by age, changing the segmentation of the school day into longer blocks of time for deeper learning, as well as learning becoming not just a daylong but a lifelong experience. He concludes with the need for education to be teaching learners to be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial with strategies and new evolving technological tools to discover the knowledge they need to create what they imagine.
Christine Marsden

Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change - 0 views

  • Within four years a pencil and a pad of paper will be placed in every single classroom of the country so that every child, rich or poor, will have access to the new knowledge technology. Meantime the educational psychologists stand by to measure the impact of pencils on learning.
  • In fact what I now understand that the Foobarian educators would actually do is not reject the pencil but appropriate it by finding trivial uses of the pencil that could be carried out within their meager resources and that would require minimal change in their old ways of doing things.
  • And the success of students like Bill in these environments shows that just as all children -- and not only those who "have a head for French" -- learn French if they live to France, so, too, all children learn mathematics if they meet it in a context that is more alive than the ordinary curriculum.
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  • The differences between Bill's learning experience and what schools offer in the form of a few hours a week in a "computer lab" could fill many pages. Here I focus on just one: The computer lab fits into the structure of school by making "computer literacy" one more subject with its curriculum and its time slots while Bill's learning cut across all these structures. He had access to computers and other technologies all the time, whenever he needed them
  • Computers seem expensive because schools put them in the same budget category as pencils. The actual cost of production of a net-based computer powerful enough to support deep change in learning would certainly be less than $500 (and I believe that with a national effort we could bring it down to $200), and its expected lifetime would exceed five years. An annual cost of $100 per year is about 1.5 percent of direct expenditure on public schooling. Taking indirect costs and the social cost of educational failures into account, it is less than 1 percent.
  • We are already beginning to hear stories about the influence in classrooms of children whose access to home computers and to a home learning culture has given them a high level not only of computer expertise but also of sophistication in seeking knowledge and standards in what constitutes a serious intellectual project
  • It is 100 years since John Dewey began arguing for the kind of change that would move schools away from authoritarian classrooms with abstract notions to environments in which learning is achieved through experimentation, practice and exposure to the real world. I, for one, believe the computer makes Dewey's vision far more accessible epistemologically. It also makes it politically more likely to happen, for where Dewey had nothing but philosophical arguments, the present day movement for change has an army of agents. The ultimate pressure for the change will be child power.
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    Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change By Seymour Papert This article appeared in The Washington Post Education Review Sunday, October 27, 1996 Seymour concluded that computers do not contribute to better learning. The computer lab fits into the structure of school by making "computer literacy" one more subject with its curriculum and its time slots. It's about access to computers and other technologies all the time, whenever needed. He has a new book, The Connected Family, He develops the idea that the computers that will be the pivotal force for change will be those outside the control of schools and outside the schools' tendency to force new ideas into old ways. He talks about the influence in classrooms of children whose access to home computers and to a home learning culture has given them a high level not only of computer expertise but also of sophistication in seeking knowledge and standards in what constitutes a serious intellectual project. The number of these children will grow exponentially in the next few years. Their pressure on schools will become irresistible.
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