Week+6+Journal

I conducted the student technology needs assessment in my class this week. I was able to scan in the sheets and print out a page of results in about 15 minutes. I now want to break down the results by different class periods and by different demographics. It will take a little of time on my part since there is only one computer in the building that has the software on it but I think the results I get will be beneficial and eye opening for me. I am interested to see how the teachers did who conducted the survey using the online form.

I am interested in the information about project based learning. I understand that students learn better when the create something. But I also know that many students do not have the basic skills and tools to create a quality product. I see this in my class often when we do small projects. Recently when studying Greece, we learned about Greek drama and the Greek chorus. Then the students learned about the Persian Wars and in their groups they wrote a Greek chorus for one of the Persian War battles. I watched as certain groups took off with this assignment and had a wonderful product at the end. I also saw certain students who did not have any confidence in their writing abilities and sat back or became disruptive because they could not participate at the level of the other students.

I found this website called:What is PBL? It describes two different styles of PBL: teacher-facilitated or teacher-guided. I need to read more about these to decide which is better for my classroom. I do think that Project Based Learning works best when it is cross-curricular. I have a teaching team that I think would be open to something like this but it requires more professional development and more planning time than we have currently.

As for the technology for the teaching video, I am not happy about having to use Picasa and Audacity. I am very proficient with iMovie and Garageband and have created many videos to use with my students. I think that it should be an option to use other types of software to produce these videos. That way I could concentrate more on the content of the video than having to spend time learning a new application. That's called differentiation.