Blog Post #9

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

Project Based Learning is something that I have seen more often recently than I have in the past. It is one of the best ways to learn different standards. PBL, in my opinion, is much better than reading out of a textbook and burping back what we learned on a test.

In John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller's post, Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning, they give seven things that are what every good project needs. A couple of the main points that are definite things to include are a driving question and student voice and choice. You need a driving questions so that the students know the main question that is being asked and they will also have a goal to reach. Having the students voice and choice is always great because depending on what the driving question is, students have a variety of things they can do for their project.

The video Project Based Learning for Teachers did a great way in explaining how project based learning is useful in the classroom. It says that you should think of PBL as questions, investigating, sharing and reflecting. It also gives many different examples of places to go online to help with PBL.

In the video, PBL: What motivates students today, students are asked what motivates them in school. The first response was that when teachers and others compliment him it makes him feel good and that he did something right.  Another response that I thought was a good one for the young girl's age is that she wanted to be able to have a dog when she grew up so that wanting to get a good job and be able to feed her family and her dog was what motivated her in school. Many students said that getting good grades would help them get into college and be able to do what they want when they grow up.

The video, Two Students Solve the problem of Watery Ketchup by Designing a New Cap, is a video about two high school seniors who really like ketchup and decided to do a project on making a new cap so that the first squirt of the ketchup is not watery. This is a great example of project based learning because the students were able to do a project on something they liked and they were able to fix the problem by making a new cap for a ketchup bottle.

Michael Gorman's post, Ten Sites Supporting Digital Classroom Collaboration in Project Based Learning, gives ten different collaborative Web 2.0 tools that will help make the project based learning experience better. I will definitely be using some of these tools in my future classroom!