Reflection #11 :)

1.    What occurs as a result of using the Project-based learning approach.          

Project-based learning is a way to plan a real-world project that allows you to connect with your students and offer them a different way to learning the content in a collaborative learning environment.  When we allow students to learn in this way, we are leaving them with memories and artifacts they can hold on to, as well as real-world collaboration and critical thinking skills they will need in the real world.  When using the PBL approach correctly, we are left with many ideas for reshaping our next learning adventure for students, such as finding new ways to organize our classroom, create connections and communicate with students/parents and the community, and finding meaningful ways to use technology and reflection, etc.   In my opinion, PBL is a great way to accommodate all learning styles and by allowing students to guide their own learning, it opens the door to many wonderful unexpected experiences and outcomes.  As a result, PBL can change the entire setting of a classroom because it does not focus on one way for students to learn the material, rather it guides students to make real-world connections and create their own activities which makes learning unique, interesting, and relevant.  Overall, the PBL approach allows us to meet many instructional goals within a project and allows us to review whether students met those goals with their culminating activities.  Additionally, PBL allows us to share great project ideas as well as our insights with others.      

2.    Ways to "bring your project home."

The most excellent way to bring your project "home" is for everyone involved to reflect on the journey of developing and creating a project.  Students should reflect openly as a class about what they liked about their project and what they would change the next time.  If everyone openly reflects about their projects, other students may pick up on something they may not have thought or learned about.  However, students should not be the only ones reflecting.  We need to be thinking about what we have accomplished and where we would like to go next. It is important to make our students understand how much we value and need their feedback in order to improve future projects and share what we have learned with others.  However, my favorite way to bring a project "home" is to have a celebration in the end during which students can share their culminating activities and reflect at the same time.  This signals to students that their project was important and is a great way to acknowledge everyone's collaboration and hard work.     

3.    Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

Everything described in this chapter, as well as the entire book has been a great resource for me to understand the steps of PBL better, from brainstorming project ideas, to creating a project, to implementing a project, to grading a project, and wrapping it up.  I now understand that wrapping up a project is very important in understanding what students liked about a project or did not.  I need to analyze this information and use what I have learned to improve and change a project in order to make it more relevant to students in the future, and meet all the required learning goals that I set out to meet.  We will bring our project home during final's week when we will reflect on our project experience, our collaboration, as well as the technology we have learned to use and incorporated into our web site (culminating activity).  This will in turn guide our professor to make necessary changes based on what we really liked and what we didn't, what we found easy or difficult,or whether we incorporated the technology standards correctly, etc.