Spangler: Chapter 3 RR

Chapter 3 talks about the framework for setting up a project. The first step towards creating a project involves identifying the core concepts and processes. These are essentially the big ideas that students should take away from the project. So teachers should start by asking themselves what knowledge they want their students to gain from the project. Once you as a teacher identify your broad concepts it is important to consider why these concepts are important and why other people would care about them. When you can apply this to the real world that is when it can be a successful “big idea.”

It is also important that the project help improve your student’s 21st Century skills. What can this project do that traditional lessons cannot? This chapter also discusses the Bloom categories of learning objectives. You can incorporate these into your lesson structure and the objectives highlighted in this chapter are analyze, evaluate, and create.

21st Century literacies are also important in taking what a child learns from a project, beyond the project and used in the real world. For students to develop information literacy it is important to review the ISTE but it basically knowing when and what information is needed, and how to locate it using technology.

There are seven essential learning functions discussed in chapter 3. #1 is ubiquity, which means learning everywhere, in and out of the classroom. #2 is deep learning. This means when students have to use higher-order thinking to navigate and create representations to learn. #3 is making things visible and discussable means using visual representations like Google Earth as a source. #4 is expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community is about using things like facebook and myspace to create a social network on the web. #5 is collaboration and working with others. #6 is research and is using search engines to do research for projects. #7 is planning and organization, which is all about managing time.

This chapter relates to our project because it is all about how to set up a project for your students. This is what we are doing for our assignment so this chapter helps a lot.