What is it? This summary of research on Project Based Learning also appears in the BIE book PBL for 21st Century Success. It provides a quick look at key studies showing PBL's positive effects on student academic achievement, mastery of 21st century competences such as problem-solving and critical thinking, addressing the needs of diverse learners and closing achievement gaps, and increasing students' motivation to learn.
"Your textbook is just another tool in your teachers’ kit of ways to engage learners. The problem is that for many of us it becomes a crutch when we first begin our planning. The textbook can be very useful for planning our curriculums and lessons."
Reading is far to often a challenge for learners. Though they may be able to pronounce, identify and understand the words on the page, true literate reading in which learners are able to create meaning and understanding from text is a complex task. Schools are inundated with reading programs the majority of which are designed around traditional paper bound texts or printed sheets.
However, more and more often educators and learners are turning to digital formats for classroom and homework reading. Digital media represents a cost effective and open system that allow learners access to their own interest as well as a wealth of content information. That torrent of information can quickly become an impenetrable labyrinth for learners of any experience level. Finding good and reliable tools and strategies to aid learners is made more difficult when services close down or change pay structures making them unusable.
There are a few reliable strategies that make all of this manageable for both educators and learners. Learners need to develop sound search strategies. Google Power Search is an open course that demonstrates many of the lesser known capabilities of what the Google Search page can do for learning. Specific searches such as Google Scholar bring academic and professional research to younger learners and give them access to content experts.
Good search techniques can bring learners to the information that they need, but once there new digital literacies begin to effect a learners ability to deal with that information. Learners are quickly confronted with not only the text but multiple images, videos, colored links and advertisements specifically designed to draw there attention and pleading them for a mouse click. As learners hyper-navigate their way from one link to another they begin to use up valuable class and study time clicking and scanning without making good judgments about the accuracy and value of the content of the sites that they are visiting. Collecting and curating information amid all the distractions is vital to developing good digital reading techniques. Educators promote quite distraction free environments and good note taking or reading journals for learners while the read printed texts. Those same strategies are also important to digital reading.
Before Readability
Apps that limit images and advertising, such as Readability and Evernote Clearly help to limit the online distractions. These services strip away all of the distraction through a browser app leaving the text free of most images and ads. The links that remain can be managed through the right mouse click "open in a new tab" option that lets the reader open the link that they want to follow without breaking the learner's reading flow. By encouraging learners to read one page at a time, they can continue to use their print reading strategies to full effect.
After Readability
Many educators encourage learners to read print media with a highlighter or pencil so that they can mark up documents in order to increase comprehension. When reading from a screen a physical writing utensil will not mark a digital document. The simplest solution to this is a notebook in which students hand write questions, thoughts and content notes. These physical notes make it difficult for learners to keep track of links, images and make video impossible to record except by written description.
Bookmarking, markup, and notebook software digitizes this important digital reading process. When reading online it is vital that learners become good curators of information. Organizing resources for learning so that they may return to them for later is an important strategy for digital reading and learning. There are several good digital notebook services online including Evernote and Springpad each with web clipping tools that allow learners to tag and collect information directly from websites to a personal notebook. Sringpad has an additional social aspect that learners find useful in which they can send invitations for whole notebooks or individual notes to other learners or they can make them public and can create online discussions around content ideas, issues, or problems. Both services are user friendly enough to grow with the learner. Regardless of educational level anyone can benefit from learning and developing digital reading strategies.
The simple truth of reading online is that there is too much information for anyone to take in all at once. Learners must learn to read in a multidemensional format that allows them to navigate deeply into the text at the touch of a button. Young learners must read with a skeptical mind and to dig for detail, never assuming that the first link from a search engine is the best or most effective answer to their person content questions. They must learn to collect and curate information and to process it into their own creation while giving credit to those sources that made their work possible. As learning become more social in the 21st century digital notebooks and collection of information will become the new currency of the digital realm. Are we readying learners to profit from this?
Recently Jeff Howard tweeted a link to Sophia Mavridi's wonderful article "We need pedagogy, not just cool tools." which reminded me how easy it is to get so enamored with some new tech toy that I forget about the reasons why am using it. Every piece of physical technology or digital tool that comes into my class has to fit into the intricate puzzle that is an 8th grade inquiry based social science class. Strangely, when learners are working well within the system that they and I have hammered out they know how to reshape the pieces just enough to make just about anything fit.
Take into account the number of new tools developed each month and attempting to learn them all as a class would be impossible. The more tools that are presented to learners the fewer they master as a group, however that can lead to a diverse cohort of cooperative skills that create a system of collaboration and team work that is more akin to many modern business models. Wait, stop. That might actually be a good thing. Digital tools come, get altered, stale like bread, become redundant, go out of fashion, get bought by that company I hate, raise their prices, and or disappear all together, sometimes in the course of a year.
An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye. (Michelangelo)
These issues have created two models for technology integration in the Authentic Classroom which are often put to work simultaneously. The Design First method asks learners to research, think, ideate, and create through a modeling process before that get any where near the computer. Ideas are drawn shared discussed and edited on paper or dry erase surfaces well before learners sit down at a computer to build there digital version. Setting down with the model in hand makes digital work much more efficient. The Tech Spec (technology specialty) method asks each learner to develop a finite tool kit of simple, yet creative, research input and product output tools that help them learn and demonstrate that learning. All of our learners have Google Drive accounts which provide them with basic word process, database and presentation capabilities. In addition to the basic tools each learner is encouraged to develop skill in others that best fit the project or product that he or she is making. When a learner expresses interest in a new tool he or she is asked to experiment with it and to find tutorials and examples from others to ensure that is will meet their needs. Then the learner must produce two or more projects with the tool before they can add another.
Digital tools are treated like any other tools that a creative person uses. The process is similar to the maker movement in engineering and electronics. It is that type of Making that we are working towards. Silvia Martinez and Gary Stager have created a fantastic look into modern engineering based Making in the classroom, but even that very science centered format transforms easily over to social science when learners are actively investigation history, anthropology, physiology and economics in order to build cultural and social reconstructions from historic evidence. Using technology to develop the research and to analyse information creates time for deeper though construction, Adding the technology to the end production enables them to "make" there Ideas visible to the world.
Ultimately, the real test of any technological tool rests in four questions. Does it enable better research and thinking? Does it enable my design idea to become real? Is it usable, reliable, and if possible free? Can I share it with others for collaboration and presentation?
About three years ago, I began seeing the words "authentic learning" more and more online and in professional development. And like any other good teacher I nodded my head and said "Yes, yes we need more of that." but quickly i realized that while the term was paraded around no one seemed to be able to readily be able to define it. So like a good learner is set off to determine for myself exactly what authentic instruction was and what it should look like in my classroom. What follows are the results of that three year exploration into how the learners that have passed through my door have used, both successfully and unsuccessfully, to guide me in the discovery that authentic is not about me its about them.
Authentic learning: Any of a variety of processes or activities in which an individual becomes engaged in the gathering, processing, or application of knowledge to which they are capable of making a personal and lasting connection.
To be an authentic educator I had to do a couple of things:
Get off the Stage
I found myself after several years of teaching being the sage, extolling all of the knowledge that I had assimilated down upon my students. I thought that my passion for my interests would engage them. Although I might intrigue them for a moment they were not truly engaged. So I began to guide them toward taking responsibility for their learning.
Become the learner
I needed to look at the kids that came into my room differently, so I stopped looking at them as students and started looking at them as learners. In doing so I was forced to re-evaluate my position as well. A teacher passes information but if I was going to turn responsibility over to them then my role as teacher needed to shift as well. How could I profess to be a life long learner if I called myself "Teacher-Master of all I Survey" Hence, my title became "lead learner" which I share with my learners whenever the lead each other in learning teams.
This didn't take place over night and every year a new group of learners walks into my room and begins the process again. Though hard work on all our parts, a lot of mistakes (mistakes are good), and learning each class grows more than they ever expect. And I am always amazed.
Last year I presented at the NC CCSA conference to demonstrate the possibilities of Authentic learning in a middle school classroom. From that effort I developed the Authentic Classroom resource list on paper.li, and the original presentation. With the publication of the new C3 and Next Generation standards for social studies and science authentic learning moves to the front of the learning stage and so this blog becomes the next piece of the authentic puzzle.
