Blog Assignment #9

What Can Teachers and Students Teach Us About Project Based Learning? 

    After reading Seven Essentials for Project Based Learning, I learned that these seven essentials are great ways to keep students involved and excited about learning. These seven essentials consisted of a need to know entry event, a driving question, student voice and choice, 21st century skills, inquiry and innovation, feedback and revision, and a publicly presented project.A need to know entry event can be something like a video of what they are going to do the project on, a professional talking to the class, a field trip to get the students excited and to get them asking questions. A driving question for a project gives the project a purpose and a challenge to the students. The student voice and choice makes the project meaningful and allows the students to design,create and present the products in the way that they chose. The 21st century skills are skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of technology. Inquiry and innovation allows students to draw their own conclusions and allows students to formulate their own driving questions. The use of feedback and revision allows students to use rubrics to critique other students' work. A publicly presented product makes students care more about the quality of their product. 

    After watching the video Project Based Learning for Teachers  , students learn skills in collaboration, critical thinking, and career and life while meeting standards set by ACCRS and working on thir project based learning project. Instead of teachers teaching the students how to do projects, in pbl students take charge of their learning and this keeps them engaged and allows students to do the work themselves.

    In Project Based Learning and Physical Education, students see what and why they are learning by doing the project themselves. In this blog post the writer gives the seven essentials and how he applied them to a project for his students. The need to know allowed his students to generate questions and engage in the research. The driving question was one complex question that the students were to base their project on to be able to answer this question. The student voice and choice allowed the students to chose their own p.e. unit and had to prove how their project would meet p.e. needs. The 21st century skills that they used were collaboration and presentation. Inquiry and innovation consisted of an open-ended project and allowing students to create something new. Using feedback and revision allowed students to experience eachother's units and then allowed for feedback to help with the revision process. They presented their products to an audience.

    Project Based Learning in PE allowed high school students to create p.e. programs for students in middle school. This project gave students the opportunity to collaborate with other students and allowed them to apply teamwork skills. The middle school students then were able to participate in the program that the high school students created and allowed the high school students to act as if they were the teachers. 

    In Ten Sites Supporting Digital Classroom Collaboration in Project Based Learning, students are given the opportunity to network while using PBL by using communication and collaboration between students, teachers, and experts. This post gave many different resources that students and teachers can use to help in the learning experience of the PBL. Some of these sites were Titan Pad, Wall Wisher, Corkboardme, Google docs, and many more. These sites can help students collaborate and gives them more ideas.