Saturday, June 1, 2013

Project Based Learning

I love giving students the opportunity to be creative in their presentation or learning, and I want to incorporate more technology.  However, one thing I discovered when attempting this with my students this year was a gap between what they can do online  their basic computer skills.  For example, my kids could easily create a Prezi, embed YouTube videos and create sound files.  However, what they couldn't do was right click to save a picture to a file from the Internet, rename files in their personal drives and use keyboard shortcuts to navigate between windows, etc.  The process took so much longer than I had anticipated because I had assumed my 7th graders would have already mastered these skills.  When I do this again, we'll have to take some time to teach these skills at the beginning before I actually turn them loose to create.

3 comments:

  1. I love the idea of having my 3rd graders use technology for assignments and assessment. I am still struggling with the logistics of how to manage it. We have 1 computer lab for the school and the laptops are pretty intimidating. And as you mentioned, they are very lacking in typing skills and how to navigate around the web. I will try hard to add technology into our class time and work on it from there.

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  2. My biggest problem with research projects if finding reliable websites for the students to use. I tell all of them that Google is not a resource, only a search engine. I would love to find a list of reliable websites for my students to use. If you happen to have a list of websites would you please share them? Thanks.

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  3. I agree with you, Peggy. Students have no idea how to decide whether or not something from the Internet is reliable. I struggle to teach it because it seems so innate to me (most likely because I was taught well...). This year, I was looking for a reliable article on the French Algerian War to use with my 8th grade French classes. I found a great one from the Princeton History Dept website, but when I clicked the link to go to the original source, it took me straight to Wikipedia. I thought to myself, if Princeton can't even get it right, how can I expect my middle school students to?

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