Every grade level and subject are focuses on a big idea, those big ideas are broken down to help the students with project based learning. Once you have understood the overarching concepts and processes you want your students to understand, figure out what ones are the most important. This will than help with the application or relevance in the real world, this will than help give you realistic ways to teach and guide your students. It will be hard to teach about one big idea, like earth science in the book but break that down and come up with ideas and teach off those instead. You want to remember to always come back to your big idea though.
21st Century skills plays an important with your big ideas, this means you will need to look beyond the subject. Having a well-designed project gets the students learning in ways they hadn't before.With project based learning you can follow three different higher-order thinking skills and the many actions that go along with them. The three skills are: Analyze, really examine the big idea and project, have other teachers look over it or work in the communities like we talked about last chapter, really explain your ideas and points, compare and illustrate. Evaluate, this meaning you must take the time to really improve, debate you ideas, convince and overall assess what it is you want the students to really understand. Lastly create, you might need to adapt in the middle of a project but just be prepared to nothing is ever perfect. So be about to anticipate, combine, compose and imagine. I really like the ideas of reconsider, not just on a biography but anything that might be boring to students and that don't get them involved.
I really liked the question that was being asked in the book about "21st-century literacy mean for today's learners?"I believe that we will look at books and writing paper in a new way, that will get the students excited to read about boring topics but making it fun with project based learning. "literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials with varying contexts." This goes way beyond just reading a book and writing a paper on it. Creativity needs to be put in place as well as innovation.These idea will help the students become independent.
There are 8 really important essential learning funcations: 1) Ubiquity: learning inside and outside the classroom, and all the time. Taking the students outisde of the plan old classroom will help them open up and learn in new exciting ways, they can also be more hands on. Everything and everyday can be a new learning experience for a student so make sure to keep that in mind as well. 2) Deep learning or going beyond whats right in fornt of t you and the students, as the book says find "raw" information on the web. When students have to dig deeper and look hard for answers but in a fun way they are using a higher order of thinking. They might come up with a lot of imformation so get them using a new way of organiztion. 3) Making things visible discussable, start using digital tools, they are very hands on and fun for the students. 4) Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community gets students on the web and share ideas with people all around the world. Maybe start up a blog to express personal ideas and than students can comment and share there ideas with them as well. 5) Collaboration- Teaching and learing with others is so important in the project based learning system, everything for the most part is done together in pairs or a large group. Collaboration will get the students sharing ideas and planning together. 6) Research, as a teacher you are coming up with the big idea and sub parts to the big ideas but once a project is put together let the kids have fun and do much of the research on there own. They arent looking in books for answers anymore but to the real world or thw web for help. 7) Project management: Planning and Organization, this will be very important when it comes to project based learning. Students need to learn to manage time, get feedback from others and have everything set and organized to make the project flow. 8) Reflection and lteration, once again deep learning happens when you look at all side and others points of view. It might help if you are stuck to look back at everything you have done up to that point. Get ideas out on the table and share what ypu have come up with together, maybe you missed something and others can help.
All these concepts will need to be put in place when it comes to our project, only because they are important to project based learning but because they will help to shape are ideas and be able to come out with something really great for the students. All these ideas will shape how we plan and teach for the 21st student, using all new ideas and ways.
I like when you talked about how you have to break down the big idea. I totally agree, it would be extremely difficult to try and teach your students sporadically about one huge topic. When breaking down the topic it is also extremely important to make note of the standards and even use those to help you break down the topic into the order of what needs to be taught in what order.
ReplyDeleteI agree on how important 21st learning is and how much improvement skills will be mastered. I like how you talked on a very relatable term to the teachers and students. I also like your viewpoint from the questions that were asked in the book. It was interesting seeing someone else's views. Good Job!
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