Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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Shahi - A visual dictionary | Blachan Lab on 2009-04-26
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The Power of Project Learning | Scholastic.com on 2009-04-26
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For the next generation, these skills are only going to get more important.
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Today’s technology, from Web 2.0 tools to data collection devices, allow students to produce work akin to that of professionals,
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homas Friedman’s 2005 book, The World Is Flat, which crystallized the changes in today’s global marketplace, from outsourcing to the digital revolution and made clear the necessity of changing the aims of American education for the 21st century.
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Buck Institute for Education in Novato, California,
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ane Krauss, coauthor with Suzie Boss of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age.
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New Technology High School in Napa, California, is the epicenter.
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New Technology Foundation followed, its mission to help replicate Napa’s school model throughout the country.
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There are now 40 New Tech schools from coast to coast, including eight in California and four each in Texas and Louisiana.
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every student at Tech Valley has a computer.
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school’s schedule is open enough to give students the time they need to delve deeply into projects.
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have students use technology to research, produce, and present. High Tech High students regularly make movies, robots, and websites, and finish by presenting their work publicly to real audiences.
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East Coast example is the Science Leadership Academy (SLA)
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facing testing pressure, compartmentalized subjects, and a schedule that sends students onto the next subject before they can delve deeply into a topic. There’s not “enough time to do anything.”
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it can be easier to start a new school like Tech Valley than to overhaul an existing school to create a PBL environment.
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-26
A point I've been belaboring.
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chedule allows for cross-curricular work to be done over a period of hours per day. “[In a traditional school], it’s difficult to work on a project. You can’t do it in 45 minutes,”
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ability to store all the parts of a project on a network
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“Some people are worried that if someone walks by a classroom, and it seems disorderly, it will look like students aren’t on task. It’s a problem for people to tolerate more movement and conversation,” author Jane Krauss says. “Chaos is a scary word that’s not really scary,” agrees Smith. “It means freedom.”
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“It’s hard to teach in a way we were never taught,
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it doesn’t mean the end of lectures, small-group work, or other techniques used by most teachers. These techniques can be sprinkled into a three-week project when appropriate, and, in fact, can help assure teachers that their students are gaining knowledge.
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“It’s not an additional burden of work, it’s a transition of work,”
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Instead of creating daily lessons, teachers do their planning before the launch of a project. Once the project starts, their job is to make sure students stay on track and cover the objectives.
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-26
I've noticed this in my own attempts at PBL. Daily lesson plans don't really work. You have to map out, starting with the end, the project and all the mini-lessons, activities, resources need to scaffold students. You have to adjust from group to group, student to student, class to class. Instead of DAILY lesson plans, unit plans are much more valuable. I find that having them on a wiki with linked resources is even more valuable than writing them in a traditional planbook.
IDEA: What if charter school teachers all keep lesson plans on a wiki or blog? Lesson plans would be UNITS rather than day-by-day traditional plans.
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The move to PBL doesn’t have to happen overnight
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“We encourage small steps, projects that take weeks, not months.”
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“There are students who are good at the game of school. This was me in high school. Tell me the assignment and I was good to go. We have to give [students] permission to think, not teach them what to think.”
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“It’s moving from guided inquiry to open inquiry,”
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Creating a great classroom project is more complicated than taking a single lesson plan and stretching it out over several weeks.
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Speaking about the common habit of turning to PBL as a year-end “reward,” she says, “The idea is not to get our vegetables and then have our dessert. The core curricula needs to be the project itself.”
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“The best questions have no clear answers,” says Tech Valley High School Principal Dan Liebert. “As opposed to getting the right answer, [we tell students] to come up with an answer they can defend.”
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elements of a good project should include relevance for students, ample time to plan, change, and complete the project, and enough complexity to inspire intense work. There should also be a way to connect the project with people across the hall, on the other side of town, or across the world, an opportunity for students to collaborate with peers, international experts, and anybody in between, and a way for students to share their completed work.
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At SLA we use Understanding by Design as our unit planning tool. We also have a common assessment rubric. Every major project the students do here is graded on the same five elements—design used, knowledge displayed, application of knowledge, presentation, and the process followed.
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-26
I need to find a copy of that assessment rubric.
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We also employ a school-wide “essential question” that changes with each grade. In ninth grade, it’s identity; in tenth, it’s systems; in eleventh, it’s change. This way there are common elements no matter what class a student is in, and that allows for a more unified day.
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“At the end of a unit, what is the assessment tool you use to see what students have learned?" In a true PBL classroom, student work is the ultimate assessment of learning. That’s not to say that tests and quizzes don’t play a role in a PBL classroom. The tests and quizzes are now interim assessments to make sure the students can do the harder job—which is to transfer the knowledge to the work they create. That is true project-based learning.
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Creating Critical Readers: A Too-Easy Diigo-Google News-Student Blogging Project | Beyond School on 2009-04-25
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Happy Birthday, Strunk and White! - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com on 2009-04-25
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the passive is a perfectly useful and respectable type of clause
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Any young person prone to getting tattoos might consider having a few of these permanently engraved where they can readily be seen:
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Omit needless words. Use concrete language. Be clear. Avoid fancy words. Revise and rewrite. Pure gold.
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It’s easier to write quizzes about rules than options, and it’s easier to memorize rules than options, but English is a messy language. Wishing there were hard-and-fast rules doesn’t make it so.
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-25
Amen. Teaching young writers to read like writers READ LIKE WRITERS helps them begin to notice the choices author's make. Helping students to understand the complexity of writing and to appreciate an author's style and to develop their own style is more important than memorizing a list of grammar and punctuation rules.
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NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf (application/pdf Object) on 2009-04-24
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The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (chapter1) on 2009-04-24
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just remember that all the people in this world
haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-24
Nick's conversative upbringing clashes with the more liberal values he encounters in New York. This same clash of values is at the forefront today. Just this week Miss CA declared b/c of her upbringing she opposes same-sex marriage. Her proclamation spurred a storm of controversy and debate between conservative and liberal viewpoints.
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just remember that all the people in this world
haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
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cheerful
red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-27
Normally, we think of love for the color red and purity for white like the white wedding dress. But, in Tom and Daisy's case, the red is more reminiscent of blood--as in marred, damaged and the white death--as in their marriage hollow and empty.
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They were both in white, and their
dresses
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-27
Why do Jordan and Daisy wear white? Young, innocent, girls? Perhaps Daisy mourns the loss of her younger years when she was the most popular girl and all the officers waited in line for her.
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A night in Acadie - Google Book Search on 2009-04-24
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-24
Clever syntax here--a trio of infinitives
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Google Books » Google Nemesis on 2009-04-24
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New Battle Lines on Gay Marriage - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com on 2009-04-23
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does that make Hilton want to go snatch the presidential seal off his podium?
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LIsa Huff on 2009-04-23
His stand-alone rhetorical question captures the essense of his argument: no individual--be he the president or a pageant contestant--ever represents ALL Americans, yet all Americans should respect the right for each individual to give voice to his ideas, even when those ideas differ from our own.
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Does that sound even remotely like American ideals?
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