Reading Reflection #5

The items that should be considered before starting a project with students are what materials you will need, will your project involve the use of technologies that are new to you or your students, will you need to expand your students’ access to technology, will your students need access to experts to answer the questions that are apt to come up during the project, and who else can help with your project. We need to see what supplies, tools or other materials are available at school or offered by the parent community and other supporters. We need to think about the essential learning functions we need technology to deliver, and then select the tools that will help students meet the learning goals. We need to think creatively about how to make access more frequent and equitable. Teaching students to become effective managers of their own time should be a primary goal of any project. It’s a skill that will support them throughout their education and beyond. Teachers should plan a project calendar with milestones along the way because it will help students see deadlines of upcoming milestones so they can plan ahead, track their own progress, and double shoot potential delays before the fall behind. Learning management systems offer teachers and students another way to organize the components of a project in an online environment. The project-management tools and strategies teachers need include: tools for communicating with students and others about the project, tools for making milestones and events visible and for notifying students when changes occur, methods for getting resources to students, systems for managing work products, structures that support a productive learning environment in which teams and individuals are engages in a variety of learning tasks at the same time, and assessment tools and strategies. The project-management tools and strategies students need include: systems and tools that help them manage their time and flow of work, systems that help students manage materials and control work drafts, collaboration tools, methods for seeking assistance, ways to get and use feedback on their own work, through self-reflection, team input, and teacher advice, and ways to work iteratively and to see how parts add up to the whole. A wiki, blog, or a Web-based “desktop” application are some of the technology applications that can be considered to use in a project. A wiki is an easily edited Web page. Users create pages of sharable content using just a browser and the most basic markup language to format text, add Web links, or build new pages. Collaborators can write and edit together, from anywhere. Wikis are great tools for developing information that flows from many to many. A blog is an easily edited Web page, but in structure and flow it is more of a one-to-many delivery system, with one author controlling the contents. Viewers can comment on postings made by the author, but interaction in a blog is less of a free-for-all than a wiki. Blogs offer great tools for communicating about progress or milestones and to broadcast news related to the project. The concepts in this chapter relate to our topic/project because it helps me think of different management needs I should be putting into my project as well as what should be considered before starting a project with students. If we don’t know what to consider before starting a project, then we will struggle developing the project for the students. If this happens then the project may be a complete waste to do with the students.