Reflection 6

The first thing that is discussed in chapter 6 is how technology tools can encourage students to be reflective and evaluate their own strengths. After reading this section, I learned student could do this by using blogs, online surveys and self-evaluations. Students need to be given the opportunity to reflect on their capabilities. Students need to reflect on their experiences that they had and how it helped them grow along with the activities that they completed. In the book it talks about “asking students to think about their thinking and processes”. (pg. 95) This helps them think about the strategies that they use when learning something new.

            Next is several ways in which you can get students’ mind ready for a project. This is important, because if your students are interested in the topic and aren’t sure what they are doing, you won’t get their best work and they won’t want to complete the project. There is an unbelievable amount of ideas to get students’ excited and ready for the project. Some examples are, teachers should start with learning about their students’ prior knowledge, possibly using a K-W-L chart. K-W-L charts are often, the go to starter. Teachers need to get their students excited about the project topic, have them explore and think and discuss about it for a little while, individually or in a group. Before starting the project, take a few minutes at the beginning of class to talk about the topic, this way it will grab the student’s attention about the different possibilities they can take the research. 

            There are three different elements for teaching fundamentals to students’, the first one is teaching skills to student’s that are needed in order to work with a degree of independence and talking about previous knowledge. The second one is, building skills gradually, you want to spend time teaching each skill, to make sure that student’s are understanding how to use applications and know what to do. The last one is independent inquiry, this is where students think about what they know so far and where they want to end up learning at the end of the project.

            I found four important steps in preparing students for using technology in their projects. The first one is, learning functions, you want to set up a technology playground, think to yourself how you may want to set up different opportunities for students to learn. Introduce problem-solving experiences and let students explore doing it on their own. Walk around the classroom and see where you are needed. Do you need to provide a demonstration and teach a lesson on something to the whole class? It is also important to include parents with teaching how to use technology so they can help their child. The second step is tap student expertise, this includes having students’ help with teaching one another, set up different stations with different tools that students’ maybe needing to use in their project, pick a few students to teach to be an expert, and give them classes on what the rest of the class should know. Give students the chance to try it on their own after getting an introduction on the trainer. Set a purpose and expectations for why they are using these tools. The third one is, introduce project-management tools, this is having a project log or journals, and this will allow students to keep track of their learning and how they are doing so far. The last one is, demonstration. Bring in a technology specialist or student expert to talk to the class and talk about how to use certain programs. With this, you need to plan ahead and make sure that the specialist is scheduled and know when to come to your class.

            The last section talks about promoting inquiry and deep learning. With inquiry the student gets to choose the topic and questions that they want to research. Talk about what investigations that they are going to be completing, and begin helping students begin their planning. Make sure that their research is meaningful and that students are picking a topic that interests them. It also talks about having question starters especially ones that start with, which one, how, what if or hypothetical questions, should and why. With these starters it provide more meaningful thinking and is considered higher ordered questioning.

            This relates to the project that we are doing in class, because with these reflections, we give each other feedback on what they write for their answers. We also work together as a group and plan out what we are going to be researching. We are using technology with our projects and if we don’t know how to use an application, we can ask one another for help or even ask the teacher. We also did research on some websites of our choosing for our topics to see if they were reliable and up to date. This would be used for our lesson plans too, because we are providing a Hot list for them to use. This project is also considered as an inquiry project, because we start off with a topic and then decide what we want to research within that topic.