School Meet » Project-based Learning

Beyond the Rhethoric – Technology in Action

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:12:50 +0000

Picasso's Guernica

As soon as I walked into this middle school classroom, I noticed that it was completely different from what I’d seen before. The classroom was quite big and students were working in groups, gathered around round tables or sitting on the floor next to their laptops. The elevated noise level was apparent, but no one seemed to be bothered by it. In one corner of the room, Picasso’s famous painting “Guernica” was projected on the wall. From time to time, students glanced at the painting and turned back to their laptops to write down their newly discovered observation. A few groups were engaged in heated conversation about art as a tool for political protest, while comparing it to contemporary graffiti as a tool for social expression.

I noticed that every group was engaged on different parts of a multi-disciplinary project. A few students were busy researching the Spanish Civil War–the historical event which inspired Picasso to paint the “Guernica.” Others were busy identifying the symbols in the painting and what each meant. A different group was working diligently on a “Guernica” recreation, using a professional art software called Painter and a Wacom tablet. Disagreement arose over what type of palette to use in the painting. Some said that Picasso suppressed color because he felt that it will distract from the impact of the painting, others thought that a livelier palette may better serve the cry of the victims. At the far end of the room, a group of students – dressed in costumes that fit the characters in the painting – were getting ready to rehearse and videotape a live recreation of the painting, as they witnessed in the Laguna Beach Art Pageant. The final goal was to create a website in which students will analyze Picasso’s “Guernica,” in terms of its historical background, symbolism, artistic style, political message, impact, artistic and live recreations, and an itemized comparison to contemporary graffiti.

The classroom I just described is not real but a fruit of my imagination. This is how I imagine the classroom of the future to be or how today’s classrooms could be if we were not bound by outdated traditional learning methods. The technology that can enable such a classroom scenario is available. The problem arises in translating these advanced technology tools into effective learning methods.

How can a school’s investment in technology be justified as money well spent? Educational philosophy is the primary factor in influencing the future of technology in education. Evidence compiled over the last decade shows that when technology complements a traditional teaching philosophy it has a minimal effect on learning. In traditional education, knowledge is transmitted from the teacher to the student or embedded in technology-based lessons and transmitted to the learner. In this manner, “students learn from technology what technology knows or has been taught, just as they learn from the teacher what the teacher knows” (Jonassen, p12). Giving a computer to every child and leaving everything else as is will not improve or revolutionize student learning.

Computers can make a real difference in student learning only when it “enables, empowers, and accelerates a profession’s core transactions.” (The End of Techno-Critique, p.10). A classroom where students are working as young practitioners, using computer applications as tools that facilitate problem solving, is a similar environment to the one describe above. A few years ago, I remember how impressed I was when a guest speaker who came to speak about technology to our faculty emphasized that in a successful technology program, technology is only a tool to develop better thinking skills. Whenever I learn or teach a new technology, I remember this message and always ask myself whether this technology improves on student learning and understanding.

In the real world, professionals face multiple problems every day and they utilize different tools to solve them, including technology tools. These tools are usually well designed to help professionals improve their work operations. Similar environments could be created for students, where their main focus would be on solving problems and the tools could help them better understand and solve these problems.

This reality is so different from what learning looks like in most schools. Learning is and was never geared toward problem-solving. Its goal is to transmit a body of knowledge every year, of which a very small percentage is retained. As knowledge is not tied to any context, students have difficulty identifying how these bits and pieces of information can help them when the time comes to solve any real life problem. As part of the curriculum they are exposed to, technology is added as an afterthought. It is added as another patch in the big mix of curricular items that coexist but never cross each others’ paths. Ultimately, technology is utilized for things it does not necessarily improve on, such as becoming a teacher, because no one knows what to do with it or why they need it.

If our educational architects would shift the focus from information transfer to developing students’ thinking skills, they can utilize technology tools to help achieve this goal. Suddenly, technology will get a new purpose, one that helps solve problems or improve in the execution of tasks. Technology will become an integral part of the learning process, making it difficult to live without. Students who will use technology as tools for problem solving will develop a confidence and understanding that will equip them in finding the right technology for their problem(s). Using technology in this manner will turn students into young experts who can later enter the adult professional world with confidence. Achieving such a goal is definitely money well spent.

Bibliography:

Jonassen, D. (2003). Learning to solve problems with technology : a constructivist perspective (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River N.J.: Merrill.

Weston, M. E., & Bain, A. (2010). The End of Techo-Critique: The Naked Truth about 1:1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change. The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 9(6). Retrieved from http://escholarship.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=jtla

Meaningful Learning With PersonalBrain

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:55:41 +0000

In a typical middle school, a social studies teacher was contemplating how to commemorate black history month in a way that will leave a lasting impact on students who had no idea what type of life, humiliations, and struggles the black community in America had experienced. She decided to pick “The Story of an Escape: Flight on the Pearl,” from the Smithsonian Education series “Once Upon a Real Time: Telling the Stories the Past Tells Us.” The story is about the famous escape of slaves in Washington D.C. in 1848, which was a watershed in the fight of the anti-slavery movement in America. In view of the enormity of the task, she decided to divide the class to teams. The assignment was to read the story, understand it, identify and analyze the stakeholders, scenes, plot, and viewpoints. The teacher tried to avoid assigning roles because she felt that it was part of the learning process. Instead she advised students to record “story thinking” by hanging up large sheets of paper around the classroom and record their thoughts while working on the story. This, she thought, will help her students identify the main components in the story and make role assignments easier.

As students were struggling to make sense of the story, the teacher’s recommendation was indeed very helpful. It helped them focus their attention on what was important and look at alternative views their peers came up with. However, they still had difficulty seeing the big picture – how characters relate to each other, how they influenced the flow of events, what type of an impact the story had on history or vice versa. The ability to visualize how all these components relate and influence each other would be difficult for an adult, not to mention a child, especially if traditional resources are all the child can use. Students can use different computer applications to address different parts of the assignment, but none allows them to put it all together in a manner that will help them see the entire picture, like pieces in a puzzle.

PersonalBrain is an application that does just that and much more. It is a visual content management solution and an associative information organization system. It is what we call a mind-mapping solution that allows its users to branch out their ideas or thoughts in a visual diagram. Any piece of information or “thought” can be linked to any other piece, creating structures of information that reflect the way users think about the information. Mapped and linked ideas help users follow a train of thought, flowing from one item to the next. What makes PersonalBrain so unique is that it is a dynamic mind-mapping tool that allows users to keep track of the big picture even as they go on into execution phase and attach supporting documentation created with other applications. The beauty of this is that there is no divorce between the conceptual phase and the execution phase and users can see the big picture while they are busy working on the detail. Users can attach spreadsheets, documents, website resources, animations, simulations, or any other type of file that makes their nodes come to life and contribute to a detailed, well rounded picture of the users’ thinking, thus making it easier for others to understand.

If the same classroom had access to PersonalBrain, they could immediately lay out a visual diagram of the story’s main framework. They could start with the project planning phase which includes assignments, observations, questions, and resources and follow with a detailed analysis of the scenes, stakeholders, plots, and viewpoints. A student would not be able to plan, design and execute it all with PersonalBrain. Execution would require them to use different applications. However, students will be able to see how all project parts tie in together and fit into a larger context. As they work on the details, they can discover new relationships and record them in their PersonalBrain diagrams. Project parts created with other applications can be attached to their respective nodes, linking the details into the project’s conceptual view. Students can move in and out between the big picture and a detailed view of the project, never loosing track of the relative location of data they explore in the larger scheme of things.

According to David H. Jonassen, meaningful learning happens when learning tasks are situated in some meaningful real world task and students are led to recognize that the world is not a reliable and simple place and ideas rely on the context they occur in for meaning. PersonalBrain facilitates this type of learning by requiring learners to analyze the underlying structure of the ideas they are learning, while they are trying to link them to their own knowledge structures.

Bibliography:

David Jonassen, Learning to solve problems with technology : a constructivist perspective, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River N.J.: Merrill, 2003).
“Smithsonian Education – Telling the Stories the Past Tells Us,” http://smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/telling_stories/index.html.
“TheBrain.com – Welcome to TheBrain,” http://www.thebrain.com/.

You can interact with this mind map by clicking on its nodes and whenever a document is attached to a node, you can view it by clicking on the bottom of the mind map.

Making Observations With Google Apps

admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:42:17 +0000

One of the major stumbling blocks that students face when conducting research is how to construct meaning from what they read. Research usually starts with a question or topic that the teacher has assigned or the student is curious about. In most cases, the students use a search engine to look up as many sources as possible for their research. Students often use advanced search to filter research results to fit their exact topic or age level. As they identify their sources, they usually store research results in a web-based research management tool such as Diigo or Zotero. As complex as this may seem, students as young as 8 years old perform this process almost flawlessly. The problem usually starts when they open a piece of text and start reading what it says. When students get to this stage, I can almost see the wall that is formed between the student and the text. They seem mostly lost. Why is it so difficult to read text, understand what it says, and identify the things that relate to the students’ goals? Of course, the entire process is not simple. It requires students to be good readers, have a good vocabulary, comprehend the meaning of those words in context, identify important ideas and how they relate to one’s topic. Even students whose vocabulary and comprehension levels are that of typical students of the same grade-levels, tend to stumble when it comes to identifying relevant ideas pertaining to topics they are researching.

: Observations Form

These were my thoughts as I designed the ‘Observations’ tool. The tool, which was created with Google Forms, includes two fields: Relevance and Observation. Relevance is described as ‘Who or What is this observation relate to,’ and ‘Observation’ is the observation itself. As students read text, they need to focus on sentences that are important to their goal, rephrase them, and write them as observations using the ‘Observations’ form. Observations are fed in one at a time. When the student presses the ‘Submit’ button, the observation is listed on the spreadsheet attached to the form. Soon, a whole list of observations accumulates and becomes available for students to use in their projects.

This type of note-taking has great individual, as well as group, benefits. As an individual, a student can always go back to the Observations List and recall, add new, or correct observations he/she made. As a group, students can look at other students’ observations to learn from, get new ideas, or use as a foundation for brainstorming with group members. The tool is also valuable for evaluation purposes. By going through student observations, teachers can understand the foundation that students based their ideas upon. As its name indicates, the ‘Observations’ tool helps students make observations, which implies that it was not designed specifically for text. Depending on the type of

project students are engaged in, they may be required to use different senses to make observations. In a science project, students may different phenomena very carefully or even tinker with apparatus and write observations about what they see, feel, smell, taste or touch. In a storytelling scenario, students are encouraged to record their thoughts as they reflect descriptions of characters, events, and students’ emotional reactions to a story. In all types of projects, the observation tool can help students focus their thinking on what they need to know, reflect back on, and build a knowledge foundation that students can collaborate and brainstorm with.

Planning the Task with Google Apps

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:22:40 +0000

Imagine a classroom getting ready to start working on a project. The teacher has just assigned the driving question–a question designed to look into the heart of a discipline and serve the purpose of organizing and driving activities in the project. Getting ready to plan activities for this project turns out to be a challenging task for the students. The teacher, who anticipates the difficulty, decides to break the task into more manageable sub-goals and provides them with a project template designed to systematically guide them through the core components of a project: defining the task, documenting information sources, recording observations, inferences and questions. Using this template helps students become task driven, thoughtful planners, focus on one small thing at a time and pay attention to details. As a result, students end-up gathering a meaningfully organized body of information they can rely on to answer the driving question and write their project conclusions.

A Model Project with an Assignment List

A Model Project with a Task Assignment Sheet

A typical project in a planned project-based environment may begin in different ways. How to begin depends on students’ grade level, their experience with project-based learning, and to what extent the teacher is ready to delegate responsibility to the student. Task assignments may be the first thing students decide on or it may come after the driving question, if students are the ones developing it. The decision to engage elementary students in project-based learning and train them to take charge of the process is quite demanding and most teachers don’t have the necessary time to make it happen. Therefore, teachers in my school prefer to assign the driving question, provide clear project specifications and assign specific roles to each team member in the group. This does not warrant that task assignments are predetermined by the teacher. Each member’s task is wide enough to break it down to clear steps and deadlines. Students engage in task assignments after they understand the assignment well enough and have a chance to generally overview the subject.

The process of task assignments follows the students’ analysis of the role they assume. Based on their understanding of the role, they devise a set of steps and deadlines to perform it. Team work facilitates peer review, helping each member refine their task assignments. They also need to learn to synchronize their tasks, if task precedence is important for project completion. The tool that enables all this consists of a ‘Task Assignment Sheet’ and an ‘Assignment List,’ both part of a Google Site Projects Template created by me. The following section describes how to create a ‘Task Assignment Sheet’ by breaking the task into the necessary steps and components that are needed for students to be able to use it and collaborate. It is very important that you perform these steps in the order they are listed. Otherwise, you may have problems with sharing the information correctly with all team members.

Click Here to Download Instructions
How to Create A Task Assignment Sheet

Project-Based Learning With Google Sites

admin — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:28:31 +0000

Last year, I introduced Google Sites as a presentation and collaboration tool for my students. They used it to create projects covering the California Missions, Native Americans, and each of the 50 states. On the surface, the sites functioned as an online replacement of traditional paper. In essence, students were able to create quite sophisticated projects with it. For example, students were able to embed a Google Map, marked with all 21 California missions into their site, long before Google enabled this functionality. But the main advantage of using Google Sites or the entire Google Apps package was that due to its web-based collaborative nature, students could brainstorm and work with their team members and access their files from anywhere. As the students learned to master Google Sites, the company kept adding new features almost daily. Some of these additions have opened up new possibilities for using Google Sites as a project-based learning template that helps students organize their work and manage the process of creating a project in teams.

I have been a long- time advocate of project-based learning because I believe that it encourages students to become independent self-driven learners. I employed my basic understanding of project-based learning to help my students use this approach in their work. However, I always felt the lack of a systematic approach that other teachers and I could refer to when guiding students to use it. When I stumbled upon the book “Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School Classrooms,” I knew that the book was a serious contribution to creating a systematic approach to handle project-based learning in science. The authors -Krajcik, Czerniak, and Berger – have laid out a detailed formula for implementing project-based learning in science that any teacher seriously attempting to use it can rely upon. The book is filled with practical descriptions of procedures and forms necessary to cover the entire process: formulating the driving question, developing scientific investigations, using technology, developing collaboration, developing benchmark lessons, developing proper assessments, planning a project-based curriculum, and setting up the classroom for project-based learning. However, the book’s focus on science made me look for additional sources that had a more universal approach, such as the excellent and exhaustive Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning source.

After reading all these excellent materials, I was able to formulate a methodical approach to project based learning that I was eager to apply with my students. A combination of this methodical approach with the benefits that Web 2.0 technology affords, started making a lot of sense. Web-based applications such as Google Apps hold the promise of student collaboration, making it an ideal platform for project-based learning. As an avid user of Google Apps and other Web 2.0 applications, I started toying with the idea of implementing a project-based framework using Web 2.0 tools. I created a template with Google Sites that serves as a project-based guide for students to follow. The building blocks of this template vary depending on the subject that the project is focused on, but it has a few generic components that are likely to show up in any project. A typical project template may include a “Team Task Sheet” for planning each members’ roles and responsibilities in the project, an “Observation Form” for encouraging students to record and share their live or text-based observations, a “Questions Form” for recording and sharing questions that may lead to a driving question, and a “Research” section which displays the bibliography of the sources students consult.

A Project about The Pearl's Escape using Google Sites

I have created a sample project based on the Smithsonian Institute’s “Once Upon a Real Time: Telling the Stories the Past Tells Us.” The project is classified as a historical story and tells “The Story of an Escape: Flight on the Pearl.” Based on this story, I created a template that has the above mentioned building blocks, as well as specific sections that stem from the project’s topic–telling a historical story.

In the next few blog entries I will focus on each component of this template separately. Starting with the “Project Task Sheet” designed to help students describe their tasks in the project, followed by a student generated list of bibliographic resources and how to include them in the site, promote brainstorming by recording and sharing observations with the “Observations” form and use the “Questions” form to focus the discussion towards a definition of a driving question. Each component will be described for its educational value, how it serves project-based learning, how to approach each task and tailor it for your own needs. A live demonstration of templates in action will be available towards the end of this academic year when my 5th grade students’ template-based projects will be displayed on our Balboa Magnet school website.

Bibliography:

BIE: Project Based Learning: Overview: Project Based Learning. (n.d.). . Retrieved December 24, 2009, from http://www.bie.org/index.php/site/PBL/overview_pbl/

Krajcik, J., Czerniak, C. & Berger, C. (2003). Teaching science in elementary and middle school classrooms : a project-based approach (2nd ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Smithsonian Education – Telling the Stories the Past Tells Us. (n.d.). . Retrieved December 24, 2009, from http://smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/telling_stories/index.html