Chapter 3

Michelle Webb

When trying to find “The Big Idea” for a project you should do as they say on page 44 and “scan the table of contents of your teaching guides. Review the curriculum standards for your subjects. Ask you colleagues: What do these add up to?” When you combine all of these together you will be able to find something that can be a jumping off point for your class projects.

On page 47 of our reading the 21^st Century Skills were pulled out and bulleted:

·         “Analyze – examine, explain, investigate, characterize, classify, compare, deduce, differentiate, discriminate, illustrate, prioritize

·         Evaluate – judge, select, decide, justify, verify, improve, defend, debate, convince, recommend, assess

·         Create – adapt, anticipate, combine, compose, invent, design, imagine, propose, theorize, formulate”

All of these actions will help the students get more out of what it is that they are learning.  If given these tools correctly, students will be able to steer their own learning in a way that is engaging and very effective.  The 21^st century skills along with the 21^st century learning go beyond literacy.  They are more about the way a student reaches the answer to a problem then how they wrote out the question.  On page 49 it reads, “A true-to-life project naturally involves opportunities for learners to become literate in the 21^st century sense of the word…”

                There are 8 essential learning functions, 1) Ubiquity: Learning inside and outside the classroom, and all the time.  This is about getting students to transfer how they learn inside the classrooms to how they can learn new things that are going on through their world outside the classroom. Taking the skills they already know as learners and transferring them over. 2) Deep Learning. The deep learning gets students past what we are hand feeding them inside the classroom and gets them to find more information on their own that they might not have gotten from us. 3) Making thing visible and discussable. “A picture is worth a thousand words” it is a lot easier to get the kids interest in a picture or a movie than it is for someone to be standing in front of them just talking. 4) Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community. The students get more views on one topic if they are able to go online and look things up. 5) Collaboration – teaching and learning with others. Using the tools that come with technology students are better able to communicate their ideas together. 6) Research. The vast research that students are able to find online can be very helpful when they are trying to find out new information. 7) Project management: Planning and Organization. On page 55 it says that “this helps students manage time, work, sources, feedback from others, drafts, and products during projects.” 8) Reflection and Interaction. This is an important part of deep learning. Students need to be able to reflect upon what they have learned otherwise they cannot be proud and show off of the products they produced.