Project Based Learning: Construct a Driving Question or Problem

Project Based Learning Step 2: Construct a Driving Question or Problem

Define your problem:

A quality project based learning experience should be based on one of the following:

• A problem to solve. (ex. Stop ISD728 students from texting and driving.)
• A question to answer. (ex. How can we improve energy efficiency at school?) 
• A task to complete. (ex. Design a refuge habitat for an endangered animal.)

This problem, question or task drives the entire project and gives it purpose. If this step is crafted well, students will need to master your content standards and 21st century skills before they can successfully complete the project.

A quality driving question, problem or task includes these elements:

• It is meaningful to the students.
• It is posed at an appropriate level of challenge.
• It is open-ended, with no simple, cookie-cutter solution.
• It engages students.
• It is aligned to learning objectives.

These two videos will provide an introduction to this idea and a more in-depth webinar on developing your driving question or problem.

Get students excited!   Inspire!

Great PBL experiences begin with a "launch" activity that gets the students excited to solve your problem. The best launches are often brief, memorable and dramatic. They draw students in and make them want to solve the problem. Here are some articles to give you ideas.

• Edutopia
• Innovation: Education
• Creating a High Quality Launch

Involve Students from the Start   Empower!

While you may initiate the driving problem, be sure to involve your students in the question-generating process. Don't just give them all the questions they will need to answer. Let them do this work! They should ask "What questions need to be answered to solve the problem?" Of course, you should vary the complexity of this activity based on your grade level. Younger students may do this as a large group while older students can work more independently.

• Brainstorm questions as a full class.
• Brainstorm questions in groups.
• Brainstorm questions individually.
• Jigsaw the problem with groups focusing on different parts of the problem.

Project Based Learning: Determine Your Outcomes

Project Based Learning Step 1: Determine Your Outcomes

This is the second installment of our Blended Learning Tech Tip series.

As with any lesson planning, begin by determining your learner outcomes.

• What is the end learning target for your students? 
• What should learners know and be able to do when they are finished with your Project Based Learning (PBL) experience? 

Once you have answers to these questions, you can begin to design the PBL experience. Ideally, your project should include two types of learning targets:

• curricular content standards 
• 21st century success skills

By including both, you will be more fully preparing students for the world's best workforce! This article explains how you might frame your project to meet content standards.

Content Standards: "Educate"

Identify content standards to find outcomes that align meaningfully to your intended project.

• Which outcomes group logically together for a project?
• Which outcomes can be developed organically through a project experience? 

21st Century Success Skills: "Empower"

Identify which of the 4 C's students will learn and apply through this project. Ideally, students will develop and apply all of these at some point in the experience. These are transferable success skills that will help us fulfill our mission to empower our students and prepare them for the world's best workforce!

• Collaboration: In what way will students need to interact with others to solve their problem or complete their project? Not only are collaboration skills important, but they also allow students to process their learning through conversation.
• Communication: How will students communicate with other learners, and how will they communicate their learning? Giving students choice in this area allows them to find what is most effective for them.
• Creativity: How does your project idea allow students to think outside of the box and get creative? If everyone turns in a final product that looks the same, it's more of a recipe than a project. Students needs room to be original within the parameters of the assigned task or problem.
• Critical Thinking: How complex is the problem to be solved? Students need to move past recall and enter into higher level thinking challenges. If the student can Google for the answer, it's not complex enough and will not stretch students.

Next week: Creating a driving question, problem or task for your project.

Project Based Learning: A powerful way to meet our mission!

Project Based Learning: A way to meet our mission!

"Our mission is to educate, inspire & empower our diverse learners, to shape their futures, to accomplish their dreams and to contribute positively to our local and global communities."

ISD728's excellent mission statement guides us on our journey to make the school experience lasting and powerful for our students. We do a great job educating our students, but an equally important question is how can we better "inspire & empower" them? One way to do this is through Project Based Learning (PBL).

Over the next two months, these tech tips will focus on the elements of Project Based Learning. Even if you don't go "all in" on a "gold standard" PBL experience, implementing strategies that target individual elements of PBL can go a long way to educating, inspiring and empowering our students, and it shifts the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the learner. #studentcenteredlearning

I constantly remind myself that the one doing the work is doing the learning. We need to make sure our students are engaged and empowered and are doing the work of learning. PBL does this.

This first PBL installment will focus on the big picture. What is PBL? Check out this short video to start learning.

Projects vs PBL

If you are not quite ready for PBL, it's OK to begin with student projects. Student projects are capstone activities and experiences that culminate a unit of learning. These often appear after traditional instruction and are guided largely by the teacher. 

This graphic from the New Tech Network nicely illustrates the difference between these two models--Projects and Project Based Learning.

An effective stepping stone in moving from projects to PBL is to replace a final test with a project. This gets the students more authentically engaged, gives them voice and choice and eliminates the redundancy of two summative assessments (test and project). It also buys back some time.

While projects are a great place to start, ultimately moving to a PBL experience shifts the ownership and responsibility for learning to the students right from the beginning of the unit. This is a great way to meet our mission of "educating, inspiring and empowering" our students.

"Passing Out" Slides to Your Students' Google Slides Packets/Notebooks

In last week's Tech Tip, I shared how you can use Google Slides text, images and shapes to create interactive, digital packets/notebooks for your students. Sometimes we don't want students to have all the pages in a packet at once. We like to pass them out as students need them or as get them made. You can still do this digitally with Google Slides by using the new "Link Slides" feature.  See below for overview of the steps to make this work and/or this 3.5 min video tutorial for complete details. Step 1: Create a Teacher Master Create a Google Slideshow that includes plenty of "blank", temporary slides that you can complete and "pass out" to students at a later date. This slideshow will serve as your Teacher Master. (See example of Teacher Master version) Step 2: Create a Student Master   Create another, new Google Slideshow. COPY the slides from your Teacher Master that you created in Step 1 into this new slideshow. Click Link Slides when prompted as you copy slides. This slideshow will serve as your Student Master. (See example of Student Master version) Step 3: Each Student Makes a Copy of the Student Master Have students each make their own copy of the Student Master version created in Step 2. They can do this by going to File-Make a Copy. This is more easily done by creating an assignment in Schoology using the new Google Workflow Assignment (their copy will automatically be made for them when they click "Document").(See example Individual Student version) Step 4: Teacher: Add Content to Blank Slide(s) As needed, add content to the blank slide(s) in your Teacher Master that you created in step 1. Step 5: Student: Click Update Link on Slide(s)  After you add content to the blank slide(s) in the Teacher Master, direct students to click the LINK SLIDES button and UPDATE on their blank slide. Their blank slide will automatically update to the content on your Teacher Master version of this slide.  Tip: To help your students, add print and visual directions on the "blank" slides you create in Step 1. See example "blank slide" below: See Teacher Tech blog article by Alice Keeler to learn more about this strategy and see how she uses it to create feedback slides. This might seem like many steps, but it's actually pretty quick and easy to do. And I believe you will appreciate the ability to "pass out" slides as needed. Please feel free to see me for additional details.

Using Google Slides to Create Digital Interactive Notebooks

Using Google Slides to Create
Digital Interactive Notebooks

Many of us have been using Interactive Notebooks for years because it is a great
strategy to help learners take and organize their notes as well as to synthesize
and interact with those notes. Having learners interact with their notes leads to
stronger understanding and long-term retention.

You can use these same great interactive strategies by creating Digital Interactive
Notebooks with Google Slides. See below examples of how to use Google Slides
text, shapes and image tools to design interactive pages. 

(Click this link to see a full notebook.)

Here are some more examples I found by Googling "Digital Interactive Notebooks"

Example 1: Sample Social Studies Interactive Notebook

Example 2: Q & A Template

Example 3: Romeo & Juliet

Example 4: Grammar Notebook

To learn more about how to use Google Slides, see this slideshow tutorial.