Sarah Hughey's Reading Response #6

1. Discuss how technology tools can encourage students to be reflective and evaluate their own strengths.
2. Describe several ways in which you can get students’ minds ready for a project.
3. Discuss the elements of teaching fundamentals first.
4. Describe the important steps in preparing students for using technology in project.
5. Discuss ways to promote inquiry and deep learning.
6. Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

1.When discussing how technology tools can encourage students to be reflective and evaluate their own strengths, it is better to discuss specific tools rather than just giving general descriptions on how technology can help with this.  Three examples of technology tools that can encourage students to be reflective and evaluating are blogs, ProfilerPRO, and online surveys such as Surveymonkey and Zoomerang.  Blogs encourage these traits by making students reflect throughout the project on what is being learned (like we are doing with our blogs in this class).  ProfilePRO surveys the students and shows them what their interests, strengths, weaknesses, and similar characteristics are.  This tool can be used to show students how their ProfilePRO results are changing over time as they go through their project and learn new things.  The online surveys can help the students track trends and compare their assessment to the group as a whole.

2. To prepare the students' minds for a project, teachers can introduce projects with a Know-Wonder-Learn (KWL) activity.  I have done such an activity in my other education classes, and this is how it was done: The professor put up a chart with three columns: one for "K", one for "W", and one for "L".  Then, as a class, we would have to write what we already knew about the topic and what we wanted to learn about the topic.  After the topic was done, we would write down what we learned under the "L" column.  However, the book suggests creating interest and excitement before introducing a task such as KWL.  This makes sense to me, as I can imagine the "W" column being completely empty if the students are disinterested in the topic and don't have the interest to come up with questions about it.  Teachers should invite students to think and discuss about the topic for quite some time (the book suggests several days) to create optimism and excitement.  Ideas to include in this preparatory stage include discrepant events that challenge taken-for-granted knowledge, role playing, and using technology such as Google Earth and Flickr to increase background knowledge and curiosity.

.3. Teaching fundamentals are critical to a successful PBL project.  If the students don't have the prerequisite background knowledge needed, then they may not tackle the project in the right direction and will struggle learning the skills and information needed for the project while trying to do the project at the same time.  And, in my opinion, having the students work on a PBL project before they have the skills needed for it is unlike the real world, where people are interviewed for a job to make sure they have the needed skills before being hired and working on projects.

4. To prepare students to use technology in a project, the teacher should first "set up a technology playground".  Have technology be available, and allow the students to explore them by and with each other before immediately jumping into a lesson on how to do it.  Offer help when needed and keep an eye out for when a specific lesson is needed, but trust that the students have the ability to explore it for themselves.  Next, teachers should "tap student expertise" - they should allow the tech-savvy students to teach the others.  Practice runs should be done with the student teachers along with making available teaching tools (ex. demonstrations/tutorials) if it seems like a tool that the majority of the students wouldn't be using.  Third, teachers should "introduce project management tools" such as logs or journals to make it easier for the students to keep track and reflect on the project and for the teacher to provide just-in-time assessment.  Fourth, the teachers should demonstrate if they are comfortable with the tools to be used, or they can allow a student or technology specialist to demonstrate, perhaps with a screencast.  The teacher should be willing to "rely on [any available] technology specialist[s]", and finally, the teacher needs to recognize that one size does NOT fit all, so not everyone has to master every tool or application if it is not something that will potentially be needed for lifelong learning.

5. A teacher has many ways to promote inquiry and deep learning.  A method the book gives is to guide students into skilled questioning - for example, leading students to use question starters such as "which one", "how", "what if", "should", and "why" can help students ask questions that will get them deeper into the topic rather than questions that just skims the surface of the information.  This leads students to collect information and make informed decisions, understand problems and various points of views in order to come up with solutions, create a hypothesis about the topic, debate morality or practicality, and understand cause and effect.  This thinking leads to information literacy: "less looking, more thinking".

6.  All of these concepts relate to our project, as we need to make sure to incorporate them into any PBL project we create.  We want to be able to have students that can reflect and evaluate their strengths and work, be able to prepare students for a project that everyone is going to have to exert much time and energy on, not have students be lost because they don't have the fundamentals, have students be ready to use technology in a project, and be lifelong learners who inquire and learn in depth.  If the students are achieving these, we know that our project was a success and that the time and resources were well used.