Blog Post 9

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

The blog post we were required to write this week a very interesting assignment to write. This post gave more insight into Project Based Learning and how it helps students learn and create new things. This weeks assignment has shed some light on some very interesting ideas and also what I would like in my future classroom. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog post because I am constantly learning new things that will only help me get better with technology and become a the best teacher I can be.

In the article Seven Essentials for Project Based Learning the seven essentials are: a need to know, a driving question, student voice and choice, 21st century skills, inquiry and innovation, feedback and revision, and publicly presented product. A teacher can activate a student's need to know content by having a project with an entry event. The beautiful thing about an entry event it that it can be almost anything. Some examples are a video, a discussion, a guest speaker, or a field trip. An important part of project based learning is to make sure you have a driving question.  The driving question is one of the most important parts of PBL.

In the video Project Based Learning for Teachers  it explains the ideas of Project Based Learning and all of the many aspects it provides for teachers and students. In my opinion the most important aspect that PBL provides are the advantages of learning for students. Students are finding new remarkable ways to learn using Project Based Learning everyday! This video also explains the useful skills that students can gain by using PBL such as: collaboration skills, communication skills, critical thinking skills, and also career and life skills. One point that really stood out to me what that PBL is a technology that reminds us to think critically as it being a tool for questioning, investigating, sharing, and reflecting. The major role for educators is to give the students the motivation and opportunity to learn, and PBL offers that.

In the video Two Students Solve the Problem of Watery Ketchup by Designing A New Cap two students designed a better solution for ketchup caps. They brainstormed ideas for a better cap. They designed the caps on the computer, they found the cap project to be fun. They said you can't design ketchup caps in a normal class.

What Motivates Students? multiple students answered what motivates them. One student said she wanted to feed her family and have a good house, this is what motivates her. Another student said he wanted to be a business man and in order to do this he has to get good grades. One little boy said he would be grounded if he didn't do good in school.  Some students said they love it when teachers give them candy when they succeed. Another little boy said he would like notebooks from his teacher. One teacher does music Monday, she allows the students to dance around the classroom.

The video Wing Project: Crafting a Driving Question taught me how to better draft a driving question. How can we create a better wing structure ? The teachers in this video explained that you would have to take in the dimensions. The engineers explained that wing designing has to deal with loads carried. One of the teachers said, " A good driving question sets up a process of inquiry, students are interested in, and guides them toward how they are going to do the work they will have to produce."