Chapter 8.
Building Connections and Branching Out
Extending the learning experience beyond the classroom becomes a goal of many 21st century projects. Digital tools make it easy for students to share their work and exchange ideas with diverse audiences, including family members and peers, local community members, and even the much wider world. This is very important to give your students these opportunities in the classroom of skills they will use for the rest of their lives. Projects give students so many experiences to learn important information that they will remember for a long time, and also it provides them with many tools that they will use through out their school careers, and their work careers, things like looking up information, learning to use programs on the computer, how to research, working with others, making choices. Making these connections are so important for students.
Having students integrate technology into projects helps students reach an authentic audience. Knowing others could be reading, watching, listening, and commenting can be a powerful motivator for the students. They know they will have a audience will increase their drive for the project.
Students become more competent and confident as readers and writers.
Also in addition to connecting students with a real audience, digital-age projects offer almost unlimited opportunities for branching out from the classroom. As a teacher you can design projects so that your students can communicate with fellow learners, maybe from a different classroom maybe from down the pass, or around the world. A lot of times projects need research that helps communities address an issue or solve a problem and your students become the experts. Or they have the opportunities for a different class to be the experts. You can also have grade level projects where more than one class is working on a project and you can have video meetings for your students to check in with how the project is going for each class and they have the chance to make sure they know what their goals are and the other classes goals.
I really like the idea of having class video meetings and could see myself using this in my classroom. Personally, I thin it would be very time efficient if I taped myself for a class meeting and had the children watch it and while they were watching it, it could get a few things done! Teachers are always struggling to fit everything into one day so I think that this is an excellent idea!
ReplyDeleteI really agree with you about using technology to help students reach an authentic audience. In all our classes, the emphasis is always on authentic experiences, or making sure what we are teaching our students has real-life relevance. When we integrate technology, something most of our students use every single day, we are making learning applicable. By taking technology to the next level through project based learning, we can have our students present to an authentic audience where they can receive real feedback, and then gain competencies and confidence as readers and writers. By increasing our students motivation through authentic experiences using technology, we are truly creating the best learning experience.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the theme of an "authentic audience" from this chapter. We all know that we perform much better when we know we are being observed... there is no doubt about it, especially when we were younger. We wanted to impress the people watching us by how good we were going and that is the same concept that I saw with what you put in your response when you stated that when they know they will have an audience, it will increase their drive for the project. This only proves as a motivator because even the student with the least amount of interest wouldn't think to disappoint someone outside of the class when they came to learn about all the fun and engaging projects they had been working on in class...
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