Blog Post 9

What Can Teachers and Students Teach Us About Project Based Learning?

Seven Essentials for Project Based Learning 

1) Establish a need to know. The first step in creating a meaningful project is by finding something that the students have to know for life, or for the class, or simply because they want to know themselves.

2) Ask a driving question. The next step in the article is asking a driving question. This is the format in which the need to know is turned into a question which starts a discussion or lights a fire under students making them want to learn more about the subject in question.

3) Give the students a voice and a choice. Giving students a chance to create their own fun with in a project is crucial in the success of the project and getting all students to learn; however having to many choices may overwhelm the students and degenerate learning.

4) Implement 21st Century Skills.  This step allows students to brush up on and refine their technological skills and allow them to create video presentations for shier groups and make them more exciting presentation for the more outspoken.

5) Encourage Inquiry and Innovation. This step allows students to formulate their own questions and put their own unique spin on learning and allows them to see the project in a way they feel is interesting.

6) Provide feedback and time for revision. Providing feedback and time for revision gives the student a since of how their project is coming together as well as gives them tips from the teacher on how to make it better and how to buff out technological problems.

7) Have public presentations. This allows students to be competitive to try to beat their friends by making a higher grade and also makes students work harder to be prepared knowing they have to do it in front of their peers.

Project Based Learning for Teachers

In this video, Vincent discusses how project based learning is not a quick process but one that takes time to really get students to answer the question that is complex in nature. The student learn by creating a project their own way on an intriguing topic. The project allows student to develop communication, career and life skills by having to meet deadlines, brainstorm, and address an audience, among other things.

Watery Ketchup

This video was interesting to see how creative a PBL project can get and how it allows students to find solutions to problems they find in their daily lives or find solutions to newly interesting ideas introduced to them. In this video, the two students took the PBL across many subjects including math, graphic design, as well as business. By the two students problems they learned how to design a new product with their own creativity, formulate a projected profit margin, and propose the idea to members of the class. This project shows the ability that PBLs have to teach students about subjects that are rarely learned about in high schools. 

PBL High School Math

This video focused on the idea of how to bring projected based learning into math. This video talks about the trials and challenges that the teachers faced in creating this new idea of PBLs in a math class. Although the teachers have not perfected the idea of how to completely install this type of learning in math classes they did find areas to involve PBL in math such as probability where students were allowed to create their own game and then had to figure out the probability of each scenario in the game.

What Motivates Students?

This video shows what students in certain classrooms are motivated by as well as what rewards they like in their schedule of classes. The students were motivated by such things as being recognized for doing good work, future success (money and career), and approval/punishment from their own parents. The rewards they mentioned were food, going outside for class, getting free "cool" school supplies, getting monetarily reward by the classroom money system, and having a themed day for each day of the week.

As teachers, we have to find the answer to this question for our students knowing that each student is different and that we are all motivated differently because we all are wanting different things. This makes PBLs so interesting is that it is not limited by much of anything at all it can cross many subject and bring each students attention in a new way that is interesting to them