These are some things that should be considered before starting a project with students. Plan wisely. Front load before you engage students, and consider your resources that will be effective in implementing your project. Keep in mind your budget, and keep track of milestones and deadlines. You can do this by modeling. This is a 21st century skill, time management. You can use a project calendar, and break tasks down and make goals doable. Organizing is also important and team planning. You need to make sure all students are challenged and you are meeting all learners needs.
As they work in teams, you assess their ability to work and gather information but how are they working together. Is everyone contributing. Team management is very important.
As you plan for assessment informal and formal, you can also use technology to help you. online surveys are useful and as you begin to project plan, you need to think about the design of rubrics etc. to help you. In our project we will probably use Rubric Wizard in Taskstream.
For our project there are opportunities to assess progress along the way. The team approach will be very important as we divide up responsibilities and find and develop our strengths and interests.
Technology can also help teachers communicate with students and others, and students can use technology to help them mange time and work flow, they can collaborate with others, for example our sister school in Chile.
Learning management systems such as Desire2Learn are useful tech. tool. Wikis are easily edited web pages, and blogs can be useful as well. And personalized web pages can be helpful as well.
I agree with you about assessing if everyone is contributing. I think that is a hard thing to do but very important. I think a lot of us have experienced at one point or another being in a group where a bulk of the work is being done by one person. This can be so frustrating and does not help to motivate any of the group to learn. It's so important to keep a level of accountability.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea about using a project calendar, especially when completing a project that has many components with different due dates. Organization is definitely extremely important and can very easily be something that affects your project in a bad way. Having a project calendar that maps out exactly when each part is due could serve to be very helpful for many students.
ReplyDeleteI like how you worded your team approach and how your group is dividing responsibilities and finding/developing your strengths and interests. That's a good way to explain that part to students and discuss what they are good at or are interested in and can bring to the group to make the project better!
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