Reading reflection #7

1. There are three different levels of discussion. The first is teacher to teacher, this method is apart of the planning stage and can include anything from procedural to the formative assessment. A great thing about this level of discussion is that if you don't have the opportunity to meet face to face, your conversation can take place in email or on a shared blog. The second level of discussion is student to student, in this level students should be talking about their learning experiences as they happen, with classmates within their group and among other teams. Its a good idea to explain to them that conversation skills are very important in the business world and even in every day communication. Modeling good conversation to students is crucial for this discussion level to go over successfully. The third and final level of discussion is teacher to students, this includes things such as lecturing in whole group form. This level of discussion is typically found in your traditional classroom but is scarce in the project based learning classroom. In project based learning, you will tend to use whole group discussion every once and a while to shortly introduce a new concept to the children, before the children are sent off to work in their groups. 

2. When "checking in" on students to see how their project is going, it is important to ask the right questions so you can help guide your students in the right direction. Questions also   gives you a good opportunity to get to know your students and their interests. Some procedural questions you can ask are: "Are we staying in schedule?" or "Do we have all the material to complete the project?" These questions will help you monitor the students project and see if they're on task. Make sure to remind your students about the calendar and deadlines that are approaching. Some teamwork questions you can ask are: "How are team members getting along?" or "Is there a student on the team that does more work than others?" These type of questions will give you insight on how things are working within the groups and if their are any issues that need to be addressed in order to finish the project to their best ability. Offer students a safe place to address any concerns, this way disagreements will not cause tension within the group and prevent work from being finished. Its also a great way to find out who's pulling his or her own weight on the project itself. Some understanding questions you can ask are: "Have you thought about...?" or "Have you considered this research?" This are good questions to direct students without entirely telling them the right or wrong answer, because it project learning, the goal is to have your students work to crate something and learn along the way. Some self-assessment questions you can ask are: "How do you think you did on....?" or "What could you have done differently here?" These types of questions over students a chance to reflect on their own work. A good way to have your students do this is to keep a blog or a journal about their project. 

3. When students optimize technology, it opens the door to an astounding learning experience. Technology gives them a chance to communicate with other students there age around the globe. This gives your students such a broad cultural background right from the desks in their very own classroom, who could complain about that! Although technology can benefit learning tremendously, make sure that the technology you are using for the project is just right for your leaning goals, sometimes technology can be more distracting than helpful if you are not careful. 

4. One of the 21st-century skills hat can make or break a project is teamwork. Make sure to pay close attention to team dynamics when in the preparation stage of the project. By detecting trouble, you are able to help students learn to manage their own team conflicts. Having this skill is very useful in the real world. You can also manage teamwork by setting up opportunities at different points of the project for the students to rate the participation of their teammates. Another 21st-centry skill that can make or break a project is troubleshooting. Help students understand from the start that real world projects, have real world challenges. This helps them to be prepared when the project has some bumps along the way before its perfected. Help them to learn from set backs and how mistakes have great potential for learning. 

5. The concepts in this chapter relate to our project because the people in our group have to come together as future teachers to create a successful project for potential students. Just like the students need to work together as a team, us as future teachers need to know how to work together successfully as well. We will also come across some problems when creating this project to help us find out what works and what needs to be changed. Also, it was very helpful to learn about the different types of communication that is in the project based learning classroom and the traditional classroom, it was really helpful to see the two compare side by side.