Reflection 5

Chapter 5 talks about Project Management Strategies for Teachers and Learners. I thought this chapter was very interesting. Before starting a project with your students, a teacher should first think about the project, what do you want your students to research, what is the main idea of this project, who will they need to talk to or get in touch with? A teacher should first turn to the school and take inventory and see what supplies they have on hand. Next, turn to parents and the community and see if they have anything you can borrow that you may need for the project. A teacher should also put the word out there, like I said talk to parents, tell them about the project and what students will be doing, you can also write in the weekly newsletter to inform families and the community. After thinking about the supplies, think about the technology aspect, will your students know how to use the technology or applications that you want them to use, or do you need the media specialist to come in and give a demonstration and talk to the class? Also think about other specialists that maybe needed throughout the project. Lastly, think about the experts that students may need to talk to, can they talk to these individuals in person or will they need to send e-mails, will students have the opportunity to video-conference or take a virtual field trip with the expert of their choosing based on their topics? There is a lot to think about and prepare for when having students work on a project.

            When it comes to teachers’ and students’ management needs for projects, there are a lot. For teachers’ management needs they need Tools for communicating with students and others about the 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 in which teams and individuals are engaged in a variety of learning tasks at the same time and lastly, assessment tools and strategies. For students’ management needs, they need systems and tools that help them manage their time and flow of work, systems 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.

        Throughout this chapter it also talks about technology applications that should be considered for use in a project. I found three applications that include, creating a blog, a wiki page, and also a web-based “desktop” application. A wiki page is created for sharing content. You can add web links and build pages. With a wiki page, anyone who is an author can write or edit the page anything from anywhere. You can make it open to the public or have it be limited. This application is good for developing information. There are two types of wiki pages, Wiki spaces and PBwiki. The next application is a blog, with a blog there is one primary author, viewers are allowed to comment. This is great for communicating with others; you can communicate about your progress, or milestones that you may have accomplished and also to broadcast news that is related to your project. With the blog application, you can one big blog or the group, or you can make individual blogs. Lastly, web-based “desktop” application, I did not find much about this in the book, but I did find two type, Drupal and Text pattern.

        This chapter relates to our project, because we each are responsible for a section to research from our topic. In this class, we have a calendar with all the due dates on it. Everyone in our group has some sort of skills to bring to the project. Also at the beginning of the semester, we all signed a contract saying that we will participate in the group and we each will be responsible for our part and that we won’t sit back and let one person do all the work. For this project, each group has their own blog for their topic, and everyone in the class can comment on our posts. Lastly, in the book it talks about rubrics, when we create our lesson plans, we each are creating a rubric to go along with it, with the rubric we are each using the same template but we will each have different components that we are looking for.