Blog Assignment #9

First off, I would like to make the comment that I found most of these videos to be saying similar things. I think project based learning is something that is truly helping students in today's world. Like many of the videos said, "You will use the skills you learn from project based learning for the rest of your life and in your work." I chose What Motivates Students?, Project Based Learning and Physical Education, and PBL- High School Math as my three videos to go along with Seven Essentials for Project Based Learning and Project Based Learning for Teachers. I really enjoyed these sources.

I found that the seven essentials, or most of the seven essentials where listed somehow or someway in each source. The seven essentials for project based learning are need to know, driving question, student voice and choice, 21st century skills, inquiry and innovation, feedback and revision, and publicly presenting a product. A need to know is a topic that students feel is important to them and something they can relate to. A driving question is used to focus the efforts to a specific area, but leave it open ended so they can run with their own ideas. Student voice and choice means to let the student have their own opinion and let them research and work with things that may interest them, compared to other topic that may not. 21st century skills are listed as, "collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and technology." These are the skills you will use for the rest of your life. Inquiry shows how students have questions and when they are researching and finding answers to those questions, how they many come up with other questions. Innovation is when a student "finds a new answer, product, or solution" to a question. Feedback and revision is how you create quality work. You also need feedback from someone besides your teacher, maybe like peers or how we complete C4Ks and C4Ts. I feel like this is a very important part because you can never grow as a writer without critique and fixing what you are doing incorrectly. Publicly presenting your product is where you can get some of this critiquing. Friends, family, and many other people can be invited for presentations. This is where you get the ideas you would never think about and one way to improve. Project based learning is constantly "questioning, investigating, sharing, and reflecting." It is just a continuous circle. Students take charge of their learning. They are more apt to learn material if they find and research it than if it is lectured to them. Project based learning engages the students, keeping them more interested. Not only does it engage the students, but also the teachers. They are constantly coming up with new ideas and revisions to projects to make them a higher quality for the future. It is all trial and error. You never know how students will do with a project until you try it out. I really liked the idea in the math video of the students coming up with their own games. Using that you will see how each student learns a certain standard. This will make it easier for the teacher to help the student with questions, if they know how their brain works.

From my experience in an elementary classroom, I have learned that especially for younger students, motivation is key. There are several ways to motivate kids but not every child is motivated the same. While some kids are motivated by candy, others are motivated by words of encouragement. We must treat every child as an individual.