Educational Resources & Tech Tools 11/28/2015

• Welcome to the Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking

  tags: project based learning DesignThinking design thinking ProjectBasedLearning STEAM STEM maker maker movement

• Tinkering & Making | Learning Is Open

  • Integrating tinkering and making into instruction can also create a differentiated environment that nurtures diverse learning styles.

• The Role of PBL in Making the Shift to Common Core | Edutopia

  • Common Core calls upon teachers to shift away from writing daily lesson plans and toward carefully mapping out long-range units.
  • In PBL, the project is the unit. It requires careful planning from start to finish, as BIE emphasizes in its project planning framework.
  • pose questions, gather and interpret data, ask further questions, and develop and evaluate solutions or build evidence for answers.
  • Students need ongoing access to inquiry experiences that build their understanding of the world through text, and that explicitly teach them how to support arguments with evidence
  • Through balanced assessment in PBL, teachers can assess the critical thinking process as well as products, enabling students to self-assess their critical thinking skills.
  • Revision and reflection, one of BIE's 8 Essential Elements, requires PBL teachers to provide students with regular, structured opportunities to give and receive feedback about the quality of their work-in-progress, demonstrate perseverance, and polish their products until they successfully meet the established criteria for success.
  • Well-crafted Driving Questions are both understandable and inspiring to students, and provide a meaningful, authentic context for learning. Projects motivate students to learn because they genuinely find the project's topic, Driving Question and tasks to be relevant and meaningful.
  • Collaboration is a requirement in PBL.

• Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens | Edutopia

  • A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her. A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner.
  • A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product.
  • In the classroom, the act of Making is an avenue for a teacher to unlock the learning potential of her or his students in a way that represents many of the best practices of educational pedagogy. A Makerspace classroom has the potential to create life-long learners through exciting, real-world projects.
  • Collaborate with your students by having them list their queries and send them off to find answers from a myriad of sources. Keep the ones they can't answer yet. In a strong inquiry process, the students reveal their previous knowledge and their needs, allowing the teacher to craft respectful, differentiated learning goals that match.
  • Making is a process, and strong essential questions allow the educator to frame the journey while allowing the learner to make inquiry-driven discoveries.
  • The teacher can break down large units into smaller essential questions ("How does the arm length effect the distance of a catapult shot?"), and use these smaller questions to build to a monster prompt ("Can I make a catapult which shoots a marshmallow over 30 feet using these materials?").
  • Good projects require failure. Great projects can teach a student grit, but you have to model it yourself first. Processing failure with your students turns a moment of fear into an opportunity for learning in a safe place.

  • Teachers new to PBL and Making often make similar mistakes:

      
    • Choosing projects too large for their comfort level and resources
     
    • Focusing on the outcome, not the process of Making
     
    • Thinking the educator must have the answer

  • If you're looking for more about Making, check out these resources:

      
    • Makerspace.com
     
    • Makered.org
     
    • DesignMakeTeach.com
     
    • Makezine.com
     
    • Instructables.com
     
    • #makered & #STEM on Twitter
     
    • Inventtolearn.com

• Katherine Smith School Kindergarten Presentations | Project Based Learning | BIE

  tags: PBL Project Based Learning projectbasedlearning Kindergarten

• Debunking 5 Myths About Project-Based Learning | Edutopia

  • it's not truly PBL if students are simply making a collage about a story, constructing a model of the Egyptian pyramids, or analyzing water samples from a lake.
  • These artifacts and activities could be part of a rigorous project if they help students meet a complex challenge and address a Driving Question.
  • In well-designed projects students gain content knowledge and academic skills as well as learn how to solve problems, work in teams, think creatively, and communicate their ideas.
  • students need something to think critically about -- it cannot be taught independent of content.
  • A project is not meant to "cover" a long list of standards, but to teach selected important standards in greater depth.
  • a teacher does not have to go all-PBL, all the time
  • You can also save planning time by collaborating with other teachers, sharing projects, adapting projects from other sources, and running the same project again in later years.
  • Projects can increase student motivation to read, write, and learn mathematics because they are engaged by the topic and have an immediate, meaningful reason to apply these skills.
  • For students with disabilities, teachers can use the same support strategies during a project as they would use in other situations, such as differentiation, modeling, and providing more time and scaffolding.
  • For teachers only used to direct instruction, it may be challenging at first to manage students working in teams and handle the open-endedness of PBL, but with more experience it gets easier.

• Project-Based Learning vs. Problem-Based Learning vs. X-BL | Edutopia

  This article is a primer describing the different types of (fill in the blank)-based learning.

  tags: PBL Project Based Learning projectbasedlearning problem based learning maker

  • At BIE, we see project-based learning as a broad category which, as long as there is an extended "project" at the heart of it, could take several forms or be a combination of:

      
    • Designing and/or creating a tangible product, performance or event
     
    • Solving a real-world problem (may be simulated or fully authentic)
     
    • Investigating a topic or issue to develop an answer to an open-ended question
  • So according to our "big tent" model of PBL, some of the newer "X-BLs" -- problem-, challenge- and design-based -- are basically modern versions of the same concept.
  • We decided to call problem-based learning a subset of project-based learning -- that is, one of the ways a teacher could frame a project is "to solve a problem."

  • problem-BL is still more often seen in the post-secondary world than in K-12, where project-BL is more common.

      

    Problem-based learning typically follow prescribed steps:

      
    1. Presentation of an "ill-structured" (open-ended, "messy") problem
     
    2. Problem definition or formulation (the problem statement)
     
    3. Generation of a "knowledge inventory" (a list of "what we know about the problem" and "what we need to know")
     
    4. Generation of possible solutions
     
    5. Formulation of learning issues for self-directed and coached learning
     
    6. Sharing of findings and solutions
  • By using problem-BL, these teachers feel they can design single-subject math projects -- aka "problems" -- that effectively teach more math content by being more limited in scope than many typical project-BL units.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.