Reflection 5

1. Before starting a project teachers need to gather up many things to help assist their students and help them be successful in their project making. Teachers need to take a look at what supplies the school has to offer to them. Teachers need to look for supplies, tools, and other materials that are available to them that are offered by the school, the parent community and other supporters. If nothing is supplied through the school, put out a word on your class web-site or through email to parents to try to get the supplies you need. Some questions to ask yourself before starting the project are, will your project involve the use of technologies that are new to your students? Will you need to expand your students access to technology? Will your students need access to experts to answer the questions that are apt to come up during the project? Who else can help with your project? If you are collaborating with a teaching team, think how you will divide responsibilities. What are your individual strengths and interests? For which task will each of you be responsible? How will you organize who does what when? It is essential to come up with milestones and deadlines for your students. This is a way to teach students to become effective time managers. Something else to think about is team planning. How will student teams be organized? This approach to team work requires you to reset your expectations and experiment with different combinations. Also, you need to plan for assessment. How do you know what prior knowledge and interests your students bring to a project? There is a lot that needs to be done before starting a project with a classroom. Planning is the most important aspect in a project.

2. Teachers management needs:
- tools for communicating with students and others about the project
- tools for making milestones and events visible and for notifying students when changes occur
- methods for getting resources to students
- systems for managing work products
- structures that support a productive learning environment in which teams and individuals are engaged in a variety of learning tasks at the same time
- assessment tools and strategies including:
1. ways to gauge whether students are working productively and accomplishing project goals
2. Ways to assess the load balance within a team so no individuals end up doing too much or too little
3. Ways to give just-in-time feedback on student work as it develops, not just when it's complicated

Students management needs:
- systems and tools that help them manage their time and flow of work
- systems that help students manage materials and control work drafts
- collaborative tools
- methods for seeking assistance
- ways to get and use feedback on their work, through self-reflection, team input, and teacher advice
- ways to work iteratively and to see how parts add up to the whole

3. Web-based applications help greatly with projects. Some different pages a student can use are, Wikis, blogs, drupal, textpattern. These are great help when constructing a project. They are also good ways to connect with others in your group when you are not in the classroom.

4. This chapter connects to what we are doing in class because we need to learn about how to start a project before actually doing it. We also use different websites to communicate with each other when we are not in the classroom, those ones in the book are a few that we have used in class before. It is also essential that we know the management needs of both the teacher and the student because we will be in that position one day and it is good to learn about now!