Reflection #6

1.       How can technology tools encourage students to be reflective and evaluate their own strengths:

Technology tools such as Blogs offer students a way to self-reflect about what they are learning over time, such as our self-reflections on our chapters or communicating with our team members about our projects.  Profiler PRO is a way to self-assess our learning characteristics as well as others within a group, and help identify interests, strengths, and weaknesses of team members or the students in your class.  This program allows you to write your own surveys based on the classes or students’ needs and allows us to reassess their profile to monitor their learning progress.  Survey Monkey and Zoomerang are also online surveys that can be used to track results of students’ self-assessments and compare them to a larger group, such as the entire class. 

2.       How can you get students’ minds ready for a project:

The main thing for a good project is to tap students’ prior knowledge to generate interest and promote inquiry.  This can be done in several ways, such as by using K-W-L activities, or invite students to think about the possibilities of a topic by posing a question after showing a visual, bringing the topic up daily, invite experts that are mystery guests to spark students’ interests which leaves them eager to learn.  For our project, we are inviting students to think about the job of a meteorologist and the weather components he/she needs to understand in order to make weather predictions.  We will let them ponder about this idea and invite a meteorologist who will spark their interest about how their job relates to their everyday lives, as well as agriculture and tourism in Michigan.  Other ideas are discrepant events, such as investigations which arouse curiosity and prepare students to think about what is to come, or role-playing predictions where students act out what their prior knowledge of the project’s topic.  I like the idea of recording students so they can see where their understanding broke down during a discussion as a way to find out what they don’t know to start a K-W-L activity, where the next step is to figure out what they need to learn or find out.   Another way to get students’ minds ready is to connect them with experts of the field explored by students, such as a library media specialist. When school personnel are not available, I agree that the internet is a great way to meet and communicate with experts.  Flickr, which is a social networking photo sharing site where students can view other peoples work on similar projects and write comments that go back to the submitters.  I believe that the best way to tap students’ prior knowledge is when they are allowed to connect their initial inquiry to the real world, where they are allowed to connect with the project on a personal level to find out what they do or do not know.         

3.       Elements of teaching fundamentals first:

I agree that when launching a project, we need to think about teaching the prerequisite knowledge or skills (fundamentals) students need to know in order to be independent learners.  For our project, we are teaching students about all the weather components important to a meteorologist’s job in order for them to explorer them during the unit and create a weekly weather broadcast.  When equipped with the essential knowledge of the components of a meteorologist’s job, such as knowing about weather conditions, severe weather and weather safety, weather instruments, weather information and data collection from maps, Doppler radar, weather charts, etc., a prediction model, and the process of creating a weekly weather forecast, students will be directed in the right direction when starting their investigations for the project that are student driven.  By creating a weather word wall, concept map, or making a weather question board our students are learning the necessary vocabulary and background knowledge necessary to tackle their own investigations/projects that uses the latest technology.  We should also teach students the necessary background knowledge for the technology used in order to prepare them.  I agree that when students are aware of what they know and don’t know their learning takes on a sense of purpose and once that is accomplished we can take them a step further by prompting them with “why,” “should,” and “how” questions.  I believe that an assessment rubric is vital in giving students an understanding of what is expected of them by addressing what good performance looks like through qualitative descriptions of each rating.     

4.       The important steps in preparing students for using technology in a project:

To get students ready for using technology in a project, we need to plan efficient ways for students to learn them.  The first step is to set up a technology playground where students teach each other to solve problems, such as simply learning about the technology.  The second step is to tap student’s expertise by immersing them in technology where technically able students teach other with the help of computer stations each with one tool that will be used in the project.  It is important to discuss the purpose of each tool and set expectations for its use and build on student’s understanding.  The third step is to introduce project-management tools, such as a project log, a check list or journal to track student’s progress toward goals and help with their self-reflection.  This allows us to assess why students are falling behind.  The fourth step is to be comfortable enough with tools that we want students to use and help demonstrate their use to our students.  If we are not, we can ask technology specialists or skilled students to help with a screencast that students can watch from anywhere about how to use the technical process of tools necessary for a project.  It allows for tutorials about the tools, narrated slideshows, and feedback on student’ work.  The fifth step is to collaborate with technology specialists to match and teach learning objectives with technologies that help students meet them.  The sixth step is to think about the usefulness of the technical skill.

5.       Ways to promote inquiry and deep learning:

We need to guide students to choose the right questions, plan investigations, and begin to put their plan into action.  We need to let students wonder about class displays, posters, etc., have them ask questions and ask them questions to encourage inquiry and research.  We need to provide collaborative activities for investigations that are challenging.  We need to guide them past the superficial and factual to meaningful inquiry based research by thinking like scientists.  We need to encourage students to come up with more challenging questions that guide meaningful inquiry by guiding them with question starters.  Allow students to think about the project further by allowing them to work on the web for teaching about information literacy.  Offer credible electronic resources and narrow information we want students to use by distributing a list of selected sites with their web addresses to limit the attention to credible sources that were evaluated by us.  Explain these sources, look at organization, examine index pages, discuss search parameters, and read from sites together before expecting them to be independent learners.   Have students explorer search engines for reliable and accurate search engines, such as ask for kids, kidsclick, yahookids, or nettrecker.  When students understand all this, we can teach them about the “Big 6,” that offers students strategies to help find, organize, and evaluate information. 

6.       How concepts in this chapter relate to our topic/project:

This chapter is guiding us in understanding how we can set the stage for students to learn by inquiry using technology tools.  We have used Blogs and Profiler Pro to self-reflect and self-assess our knowledge and background knowledge.  To get students’ minds ready in our project we are using a similar project-launching method as did the project of the fantastical settlement on Mars, where we will use a visual or a prompting question to tap student’s prior knowledge and invite a mystery guest.  This prior knowledge will be collected in the form of a K-W-L activity, such as a weather word wall or question board that allows us to see what terms students are already familiar with when it comes to weather and the job of a meteorologist.  To teach students the fundamentals of the project, we are teaching students about the weather components to direct them properly for possible investigations in the project.  For our concept map, we have already been considering an assessment rubric as important aspects of presenting a weekly weather forecast/broadcast which will guide our students.  Several of our lessons include experts or media specialists to teach students important background knowledge about the technological tools they will be using for their lessons as choices for their projects.  We will try to guide students in order to provide rich inquiry lessons that are meaningful to them and help them to become independent 21-st century literate learners.