Reading Reflection #3

1.        What to consider in order to find the “Big Idea” for a project:

We need to think about how the “the heart” of a project, which is the complex and important “big idea,” that we choose will connect students to the real world and their own world and instill a passion in them. This is done best in collaboration with our colleagues where we need to be prepared to brainstorm as well as engage experts if needed in order to accommodate the diverse interest with hands-on and minds-on activities. We are developing this big idea by planning on our blog in form of a concept map and gradually fine tuning it.   How do we find this bid idea?  Well, we need to look at teacher’s guides for an overarching idea or search the internet, or come up with our own idea.  It is important, however, to think about the learning opportunities and interdisciplinary connections our project represents and incorporate a goal from several subjects through natural connections.  This overlapping of multiple disciplines will give students a real purpose to solve problems and offer value for their community.  By focusing on local issues through a community-based project, we need to think about learning dispositions and allow students to work together, be resourceful, and advocate for solutions by using digital resources, and information literacy.  This connection and authentic problem-solving will in turn allow for authentic assessment that is important in PBL by using higher level questioning.  I especially like when the book gives the example of asking students to imaginine, that you are preparing for a trip by asking you to think about where you would go, how you would get there, what you would do, and what to pack, etc.  These are natural connections we make without any trouble in order to connect the big idea.  So the biggest consideration to find the “Big Idea” in my opinion is planning which takes time.  So let’s prepare and plan together to make certain our project is authentic and incorporates all the suggestions in the book on page 57, points 1-8. J   

2.        21^st Century Skills:

I agree with the suggestion that the more complex and important an idea for a project is the better.  After all, we want to foster 21^st Century thinkers and problem-solvers.  Bloom’s Taxonomy is a great way to ask students lower order to higher order thinking questions that include: remember (knowledge), understand (comprehension), apply, analyze, evaluate, and create (synthesis).  However, I have learned in my pre-internship last semester that we want students to think about higher order questions and that is the realm of projects with the last three, also important to PBL.  I believe that it is so important for students to be able to analyze what they are learning, in our case weather conditions that can be measured and compared to other locations, etc.  The analysis of weather conditions can be evaluated by assessing weather and explaining weather patterns and a weekly weather forecast can be created by watching a local weather forecaster, the internet, and by design.  This will engage students, because it is authentic and students are encouraged through proper questioning to come up with solutions.     

3.        21^st Century literacy’s:

I agree that in the 21^st Century, we need to be able to do more than simply read and write as a skill.  We as teachers need to be able to teach our students’ 21^st-Century skills and a model that highlights Digital-Age literacy, Inventive Thinking, Effective Communication, and High Productivity.  This is done through a framework that incorporates Core Subjects in conjunction with 21^st-Century content, such as global awareness, something our students will garner by collecting weather data from other places in the world; Learning and Thinking Skills, such as problem-solving of how to measure weather conditions and how to interpret a weather map or communicating with a weather station and students across the globe, or using a computer to explorer important weather terms and forecasts; as well as life skills, such as self-direction by choosing which way they want to collect their data, what charts to use for the collection of data, and/or how to present their data in their presentation using technology, etc.  I agree with the book that in order to be literate, you need to be able to independently function and perform in a world that is inundated with technology, and be aware that it requires creativity, innovation, effective communication and collaboration, research and information fluency, digital citizenship, technology preparations and concepts, and adaptable thinkers who can address the challenges that lie ahead in order to be productive citizens.  So this means that we need to acquire 21^st-century skills and become 21^st-century literate ourselves in order to fill the big shoes of teaching this new way of thinking and learning through 21^st-century instructional goals involving 21^st-century technology to our students. J  I believe that no one student can be literate by learning all the information that is out on the web today, but in my opinion literate in today’s world is when you are as smart as the technology that can get you the information that you need.  So if students can learn how to learn on their own by finding their own information and share this information with others than that is a battle half won, because they learn how to find, evaluate, and synthesize information, something we want them to learn. 

4.        The essential learning functions:

The essential learning functions are: 1) Ubiquity: learning inside and outside the classroom, and all the time.  They are tools that help students to be mobile and learn wherever, whenever, and with whomever, such as google docs, web mail, mobile phones, etc.  I am seeing more and more teachers utilize these tools in the classroom.  The problem with cell phones, especially in high-school is if you know students are using them in the classroom secretly, use them to your advantage to promote learning, which in turn will spark the interest of students.  2) Deep learning suggests helping students find and make sense of “raw” information on the Web, something we are trying to do in our project by having students find, sort, and analyze, weather symbols, charts, radar imagery and weather data through real-time data sets in order to predict and create their own weather forecast.  We can also teach our students weather through digital videos and I especially like the Pearson website, which is a great teacher resource for that.   3) Making Things Visible and Discussable, such as presenting a weekly weather forecast in a digital format with graphic representations or digital art.  4) Expressing Ourselves, Sharing Ideas, Building Community allows students to express themselves by using blogs and social software to communicate with one another about their project.  5) Collaboration-Teaching and learning with others is often done through wikis, expert and learning exchanges which our students would do by exchanging weather information with students in Sochi, Russia and visiting a local weather station where they will learn about digital instruments that meteorologists use and what their job is when forecasting the weather.  6) Research in my opinion is the most important of the learning functions, because students need to be able to retrieve information, but it can be overwhelming, so we need to help them focus their research by helping them make sense of what they need to look for in search-engines with filtering, quality directories, bookmark tagging tools, and citation “engines” and something that will involve more of our guidance.  7) Project Management: Planning and Organization is best done on a homepage such as Desire2Learn, moodle, etc.  8) Reflection and Iteration on a blog allows for alternative perspectives.  It is a draft for how you think and reflect on your project collaboratively.  A great way to share ideas is on a wiki, something I have done before in numerous of my math classes. 

5.        How do the concepts in this chapter relate to our topic: 

As I have already described how this chapter relates to our topic throughout, some things I have to add is that our group is collaborating in order to develop the “big idea” of a weekly weather forecast that students will create on their own.  We have come up with several sub-topics and are continuously improving the concept map.  In fact, we have already improved it once.  We are using a blog to work on this concept map in order to share our ideas.  We are trying to include local issues into our sub-ideas by including collecting weather data in Kalamazoo and comparing it with other weather data across the globe, and visiting a local TV station to ask questions about how they collect weather data and make weather predictions. One thing we need to work on is to make certain that the sub-topics relate to different subjects and satisfy the content standards.  We also need to make sure that we develop good questions that use Bloom’s Taxonomy when creating our lesson plans where students solve real-life problems that are important to them.  We are
synthesizing information as a group and incorporating 21^st Century technologies as described.  For our project, we had to use essential learning functions by creating a document on googledocs, we have used real-time data by looking up current weather maps locally and across the globe and inserted as a visual representation on our blog.  We are learning together by collaborating on our blog as we have done when sharing our websites to make certain they were not the same and each of us finished an assigned project.  By creating this concept map, we are focusing on the big idea and sub ideas of what students should be learning to achieve the “big idea.”  This is why we have been researching to develop the concept map and are constantly planning and reflecting and iterating with each other on our blog to have a project in the end that is worthwhile. J J J