Chapter 3 "Imagining the Possibilities"

When planning projects for your students, you need to think about the "Big Idea"! When looking for the "Big Idea" in a project you can scan the table of contents of the teaching guides you are considering using, review the curriculum standards for your subjects, ask colleagues, and identify overarching concepts and processes you want students to understand. In the chapter, the author states,"Don't worry if your project ideas veer into unfamiliar territory or require you to learn new skills or master unfamiliar content." I like this quote and agree with the author. We expect our students to learn something new and try something they may not have done before but are we ourselves willing to do the same so that they can learn more? It's okay for teachers not to know everything and have all the answers. It's good for students to see that we, as teachers, have to look things up sometimes or learn something new.
In the 21st century, we need to try to use different skills than those that have always been done in the past. These skills can include remembering[knowledge], understanding[comprehension], applying, analyzing, and evaluating[explain, judge, illustrate, compare], and creating[synthesis]. In the book, the author gave an example of doing research and presenting it to the class. If you redo the project using 21st century skills the students will learn a lot more because they can comprehend by explaining what they read, illustrating something in the text, comparing it to something else they might have read and summarizing it.
Literacy in the chapter is defined as, "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts." The book also discusses how NETS.S standards are changing to focus more on behaviors of people in the 21st century and not just on their writing and reading.
Students sometimes learn more through experience than through direct teaching. Teachers can use eight essentials learning functions to help students. 1.] Ubiquity:Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom, and All the Time-help students find ways to learn outside school and using technology. [mp3 players, Google Docs, cell phones.] 2.] Deep Learning- help students find primary sources and real-time data sets which are personal accounts of stories instead of from textbooks. 3.] Making Things Visible and Discussable-try using a Visual Thesaurus or Google Earth, some kids are visual learners and this could increase their learning. 4.] Expressing Ourselves, Sharing Ideas, Building Community-using blogs, social software-Webinars, Skype. 5.] Collaboration-Teaching and Learning With Others- computer phone calls and survey tools to discuss projects. 6.] Research-Quality directories, Citation machine-these can help students when looking up topics and research for projects. 7.] Project Management: Planning and Organization- Desire2Learn and Moodle, we use these at Western Michigan University to keep track of our grades, announcements, or turning in homework. 8.] Reflection and Iteration- writing, sharing, and editing can be done on sites like Blogger or Edublogs.
This chapter relates to the project my group is working on now because not everyone has done pen pal assignments before and may not be sure how they work but we can't be afraid to research and try them out because we could be missing out on an opportunity for our students. Also, as discussed in this chapter, we use sites like Blogger to share our ideas for our project and discuss what can be changed or added.