What I want to say from the very beginning is the fact that making a summary of the week in order to post the information on our blog is the best way to offer our feed-back. The most important information is easier to be connected with the other in the previous week and ready to connect with the one to come, so as to create a continuous chain for our final project.
The articles we had to read this week referred to alternative assessment, project –based learning and WebQuests.
As I have read in the article, Project, Problem, and Inquiry-based Learning students are engaged, excited and enthusiastic about PBL and so are the teachers. On the site http://www.sun-associates.com/lynn/pbl/pbl.html we found that PBL presupposes to collect information and make observations, develop a hypothesis, make a prediction, do the experiment and communicate results. As I have read several more articles about this topic, I can say that PBL appears to be the best solution to totally engage the students and make them learn a lot effortlessly. In the article ”What Is Project-Based Learning?”, there are presented 4 types of learners who can help us create a lesson so as to make active all types of students where these characteristics predomine: spatial/visual, language-oriented, kinetitic and logical learner.
Concerning WebQuests, I consider they are brilliant since they are inquiry-oriented lessons. If well-designed , they have enormous advantages. Some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet. A WebQuest should contain an introduction ,a task, a set of information sources needed to complete the task,a description of the process the learners should go through in accomplishing the task and some guidance on how to organize the information acquired, and a conclusion that brings closure to the quest. WebQuests are designed to be group activities and should include motivational elements involving either a single discipline or more disciplines thus transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are involved.
Alternative assessment insists on what students know, on their strong points, thus the students being encouraged to learn more. Alternative assessment elements are differently sructured, scored and graded. They apply in student-oriented cases and they insist on veridicity of the requests, topics, having the advantage of letting the students self-assess since they know from the beginning the things to lead them to a top-grade.
All the three dimensions presented above, when you know the exact quantity of ingredients to add, will create a perfect combination, a relevant lesson both for teachers and their students having as result making them more autonomous learners. So far, I have never used any of the types mentioned above, even if I was familiar to rubrics and checklist. I consider them all relatively easy to use, and for sure all of them can be applied successfully with my students who are so open-minded and enjoy everything which is different of ”traditional”.
At project task 4, I liked especilally the idea of working in pairs or groups at the disscussion referring to what solutions we can come up with to the problems we have at school. Our ideas were in this way reinforced or we have got others which made us think deeper, or better said, higher. The solutions to be applied for my classroom, something I am not doing at the moment is to create a webquest, I’m not sure yet if it will be ready by Sunday night, and to use a blog as well where my students should post their works so as to make not only themselves and teachers proud , but their parents as well.
For the task this week, I have realised a rubric on http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ having as URL http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=ShowRubric&module=Rubistar&rubric_id=2072769& which I posted on the wiki page. I have already used the site to create several more rubrics and even if one wants to add or to delete certain rows, it still helps you a lot in your work.
The title I used this week came up into my mind as I understood that I learnt about very useful things relatively easy to apply at the context in my school. I am willing to say that all these would make my teaching innovative as long as I would apply them in appropriate moments of my teaching.
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RăspundețiȘtergereDear Laura Cristiana,
RăspundețiȘtergereIt is true that learning is priceless, teachers and students feel really motivated when working through Project Based Learning because they work together to achieve the task, if the task is designed according to their likes, they can learn naturally. In relation to WebQuest itis fun to work with for students because they (in groups) need to surf the net in order to accomplish an activity. WQ's are very interesting activities and they present a different way to evaluate students, instead of evaluating skills, a teacher can evaluate a product where language usage is employed.
Best regards,
Omar Hernandez Baez