In Dr. Strange and Mr. Capps' interviews, they discuss project based learning and its effects on modern day students. Our world is quickly changing and becoming more and more technological, and it is our job to keep up with it and ensure the next generation knows what they are doing and how to succeed. When I was in elementary school, we were lucky to go to the computer lab once a month, and now students have computers and iPads in the classrooms. We have come a long way in just a short amount of time. As teachers, we must first learn how to work with and use this new technology so we can teach it to our students. In Use Tech Don't Teach It, Mr. Capps iterates that technology should not be something that is taught to the students, rather it is something that students should use to learn the subject matter. It is a great way to teach students the material they need to be taught and they also learn how to work with technological tools by figuring it out on their own. These students are smart when it comes to figuring these kinds of things out, and they end up teaching us teachers a few things we didn't know. Mr. Capps also explained two very important resources that can be very useful to a child's learning process, iCurio and DiscoveryEd. iCurio is a safe internet search engine for students to research educational material and teachers don't have to worry about the students stumbling upon something inappropriate. It also helps narrow down what they are searching for and and to help organize, store, and save what they have found. To children, too big of a text or too many words can get so boring without pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words and as Anthony said jokingly, "a video must be worth a million". Students retain more information on a text when it is paired with a visual. On Discovery Ed, you can research anything and not only will it show you a picture, but it was also show a video explaining what it is and how it works. I think these are both wonderful tools to implicate into the classroom and further advance our students' knowledge.
Project based learning is very effective in the classroom today. Growing up, I was always used to the "burp back" method (as Dr. Strange calls it), teachers didn't really get us involved in what we were learning. Yes, we did occasionally do projects; but the projects didn't teach us anything new, it was what we had already learned and we were "burping it back" to the teacher. A project should be a learning process, not a way of reviewing. Project based learning is designed to get the students to be interactive with their work and learn from exploring and researching on their own. Projects are exciting for kids and it gets them excited about learning, it encourages them to venture out and explore other ways to learns besides just normal lectures and worksheets. I believe project based learning is an important method of teaching that all successful teachers should incorporate into their lesson plans.
Thoughtful. Interesting. Well done.
ReplyDeleteI like how you put that it is the teacher's job to keep up with technology. That was a unique, but true way of looking at it. You can tell by this post that you really enjoyed learning about technology in teaching. I am planning on using it in my future classroom, just like you. You also really seem to have a good grasp on project based learning.
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