Response #3

            When administering a project for a class, it is a great idea to incorporate 3 or 4 subjects into their projects.  These subjects can be anything that relates to the topic of the project.  This “big idea” makes the project more hands-on and evolves interests, and helps them think about real-world contexts because the project has multiple components.  It is also important to keep in mind, 21^st century skills your students will develop through the project.  Looking at blooms taxonomy, and the thinking skills such as analyze, evaluate, and create are things that our future students will have to use, when researching.  I think this is very important because you want your students to learn, understand and apply what they are researching and basing their project is on.  When I have my own classroom I will want my students to truly be involved in what they are learning, and not just do the project to get it done.

            21^st century literacy and skills, I think are very linked together are both should be used widely, both of these learning and teaching techniques will help students even after school and will follow them into the real world.  Literacy is identifying, understanding and interpreting written material.  Having these skills and applying them to a project will compose for a better understanding of a topic as a whole.

            The essential learning functions include ubiquity, giving your students the ability to learn form handheld devices, anywhere, anytime they want.  Another essential function is deep learning, teaching your students to go beyond “filtered” information and make sense of the information.  By making things visible and discussable students can understand more by providing visuals, such as graphs, maps and pictures.  Expressing ourselves by sharing ideas, and building community through blogs and social networks, is an essential learning function, we now have instant tools we should use and take advantage of them.  Collaborating and building on others ideas to learn is another essential learning function.  Using more filtered search engines for research is yet another valuable essential learning function.   Being able to properly manage your time during a project will be an ever lasting learning function because that will carry on into other aspects of a students life.  Deep learning happens when you look at your aspect in all views possible, so being able to effectively do that and share all the work you find and develop is the last effective learning function.  In our class right now we are working in groups, to slowly create a project that we can use on elementary aged students, gradually, we are developing all of these aspects that will help us create our own project-based learning lessons and projects.  Each week we learn about new things that we can add and will affect our projects and topics, this chapter really related to our class in that way.