Reading Reflection Number 5: Chapter Five

Starting right off for chapter five, they brought up the idea of thoughtful preparation and how it will benefit the students and yourself as the teacher. No matter the size of the project or if it is an existing one and adding to it or joining in the group it is still very important to put thoughtful preparation into it. As teachers we do a lot of front-loading for projects in a project based learning approach because we want students to be engaged as much as possible but in order to front load correctly teachers need to use good time management so they are putting the time into the right things. There are things that should be considered before starting a project with students. Before starting a project a teacher should look at what they first have accessible to them in their classroom and in the school, the accessibility of technology and things like that to ensure that the students will have the tools they need to be successful with the project. Both teachers and students have management needs. Students as discussed on page 84 “need project management skills and technical support structures in order to grapple with the rich and complicated nature of projects, [where] teachers as team coordinators, enabling advisers, and evaluators need systems that make their work and communications more manageable, too”. Teachers’ project management needs/tools/strategies include things like tools for communicating with students and others about project, tools for making milestones and events visible and for notifying students when changes occur, methods for getting resources to students, systems for managing work products , structures that support a productive learning environment, and assessment tools and strategies. Student project management needs/tools/strategies include systems and tools that help them manage their time and flow of work, system that help students manage materials and control work drafts, collaboration tools, methods for seeking assistance, ways to get and use feedback on their work, through self-reflection, team input, and teacher advice, and lastly ways to work iteratively and to see how parts add up to the whole. The technology applications that should be considered for use in a project include possibly using web-based applications like wiki, which is a simple and easily edited web page or even a blog or personal web page, and others. This chapter relates to what my group is doing because of the management aspect. Management is an important concept for teachers to understand and be able to implement correctly and for students to also understand. For our project, our students are skyping or video calling students from another area to gain more experience for the topic of healthy eating. The concepts learned so far are connecting together and are expanding my knowledge on project-based learning and I am excited to continue to learn more to gain even more knowledge so that I can use project based learning in my classroom one day.