Blog Post #9

When I first started taking this class, I had no clue what Project Based Learning was. Going through this week's assignment I have a full understanding of how much students learn from using it. What can teachers and students teach us about project based learning? Project Based Learning is a great way to have students interact and gain knowledge throughout their learning process.

Reading the Seven Essentials for Project Based Learning had a lot of great information I didn't know about PBL. Here are the seven essentials: Need to Know. This is the entry level of any PBL. What information do I actually need before I begin? Driving Question. Its suppose to give the student a sense of purpose and challenge. Student Voice and Choice. Letting students make their project that fits their personality. 21st century skill. Using technology, communicate, and have their own collaboration. Inquiry and Innovation. Using their own questions and using their research that leads to variety of answers. Feedback and Revision. Use rubrics to critique others work. Publicly presented product. The quality of the project that the students worry about and get to present it in front of an audience.

In the video Project Based Learning For Teachers, goes in great detail about about the standards. PBL has students working long extended hours to answer the driven questions that is given. We should think of PBL as Questioning, Investigating, Sharing, and Reflecting. The two main questions are:

-Common Core Standard is What?
-Project Based Learning is How?

In Wing Project: Crafting a Driving Question, teachers are trying to find a good way to do Project Based Learning with the students. They stated that a good driving sets up a question that students will be interested in. Teachers want to see how the project is going to work with the driven question that will need to produce the answers. Crafting the driving question, teachers will have to come up with difficult ideas, see what materials they will need, how it will act putting it together, and to modify it.

In Ten Sites Supporting Digital Classroom Collaboration in Project Based Learning, there are a lot of amazing websites for PBL that can help with classroom collaboration. These sites provided will help student to student, student to teacher, and student to expert from communicating to collaborating with each other. This can help students gain more responsibility using these online tools. I've only used 2 out of 10 websites, which are, Google Docs and Microsoft Live. Using these tools, I find more ways to communicate more with my group and end up learning new things as well.

After watching What motivates students today, I love to see students that are encouraged and influenced by teachers. The way we have to motivate them is to always tell them how well they're doing in class, improve on grades, or to just do well in life. It looks like the students like to be rewarded more on their accomplishments. A good way to reward them is with snacks, brownie points, go outside to play for a little, and have a clip chart of improvements of behavior in the classroom. Those are the only way that we can actually motivate the students and have their undivided attention in the classroom.