Friday, March 2, 2012

#6 Reflection


            A few tools students can use that encourage them to be reflective and evaluate their own strengths are through blogs and online survey tools.  Blogs are a great technological tool for students because they can reflect over time about what they have learned.  ProfilerPRO is an online survey tool where members of a group can identify learning characteristics, and as they learn more understanding they can reassess their profile.  Lastly, a tool called SurveyMonkey, is another online survey you can set up for your students, tracking their results, helping them and comparing them.  KWL (know-wonder-learn) is a great activity for getting students minds ready for a project.  Encouraging students to think, explore and use their imaginations and discuss the topic at the beginning is another way to get their minds ready.  An example from the text was to tell your students about a surprise guest, each day giving them new ideas to build their excitement.
            It is important to teach the fundamentals to your students first.  This is important because if you just push your students into a project dealing with skills they have not acquired yet, it will be unsuccessful.  As teachers, we want our students to be successful.  At the beginning of a project, give your students the topic to think about, this is when they can start the KWL activity.  This will inspire them to learn about the topic and drive them to participate to their full potential in the project.  By giving you students the rubric for the project, they will have a better understanding for each part of the project and your expectations to complete it accurately.  Another teaching fundamental is to expose your students to the technology, software, or programs, having them practice with it will benefit them during the project.  When designing a project it is a good thing to incorporate all subjects in some way.  To guide inquire and deep learning you can ask hypothetical questions, ask them to imagine things and ask them how, what, why, when and where questions to your students.  This chapter can be relatable to our projects especially form the beginning of the chapter, about the different technological tools we can use in a project, which we are doing in this class and also applying to our group projects and lesson plans.

2 comments:

  1. I liked the idea you talked about that you got from the book about a guest speaker to get the students interested. This could be a fun way to get kids interested, by possibly not telling them who the speaker is but giving them clues about that person, this way they are even more excited to figure out who it is and what the project is about. You did a really good job writing your reflection, and a lot of what we are doing in our own projects is related to every aspect of it.

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  2. I liked how you talked about a variety of survey tools and such that would be accessible to students that are not very difficult to use and can be accessed by multiple people. I like the idea of keeping students on their toes by telling them about the possibly of surprises the next day.

    I think you did a good job of talking about the necessity of familiarizing the students with the technology they will be using for each project so students can participate to the best of their abilities with out technicalities stopping them.

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