1. Digital tools make it easy for students to share their work and exchange ideas with diverse audiences, including family members and peers, local community members, and even the much wider world. Involving technology in projects allows students to reach out to an authentic audience. Digital aged projects offer almost unlimited opportunities for branching out from the classroom. Students might decide to talk to experts in the course of researching a particular topic. Teachers can design projects that his/her students can communicate with fellow learners, in other classrooms or outside of the classroom.
2. EAST stands for Environmental and Spatial Technologies. For over a dozen years different schools have been demonstrating the benefits of using technology for a real purpose - to solve problems and make improvements in their communities. Projects make use of geospatial technologies and multimedia tools that are more commonly found in professional labs or design studios. EAST students master these sophisticated tools and applications in context while solving community problems that interest them.
3. Once comfortable with project based learning, students will start to be more capable of leading their own projects by starting with generating a project idea they care about. Teachers should allow students to take learning to a different level and the way they want the learning to be done. The book gives the example of doing a project relating to your own life, something the students are passionate about so they can actually enjoy the project they are doing.
4. This chapter relates to our projects in class because in our project we allow our “students” to take over the project and let them do what they believe will work best. We discuss the benefits of technology in the classroom. We are also designing a handful of digital tools that help in our project process.
Susan, you had a great reflection! I really enjoyed your answer to number one, the way you described all the ways students can branch out and to what different audiences really opened my eyes to the huge impact of project based learning. I really like the idea of using EAST strategy to learning. In your reflection you brought everything together from the text really well and described and got me even more excited about hopefully using it in my future classroom someday. Nice work!
ReplyDeleteyour reflection was really well written and thought out. I really liked how in your answer for question number two you said, "Projects make use of geospatial technologies and multimedia tools that are more commonly found in professional labs or design studios. EAST students master these sophisticated tools and applications in context while solving community problems that interest them. " This is a key idea that they are learning tools that are commonly found outside of the classroom and in real world jobs that they might work one day. It is important to be familiar with this type of technology as well as using it outside of your classroom.
ReplyDeleteYou are so right when you mention that students get very passionate about what they are learning if they are the leaders and have control of the project. Overall, great reflection!
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