MY LEARNING DIARY A NEW ADVENTURE IN web space
Module 1.1. About me
My name's Maria .This is my first MOOC experience, I hope it will be for me a great opportunity to meet other teachers who share my same enthusiasm. I am eager to learn about PBL techniques and to improve my teaching method making it more engaging and effective. This is my learning diary. I've just finished my first e-Twinning course 2016 and i have realized that I need to update my professional skills.
I hope to improve my teaching competences attending this course.
I love reading and meeting new people but teaching is the most important activity in my life.
MY TEACHING CONTEXT
I work in an Italian secondary vocational and technic school. I' m an English and French teacher, actually I work as learning support teacher . Inclusion is my first aim. The age of my students is between 14 and 19 years old. I try to learn new things in order to promote significant learning activities becouse my students don't like at all going to school. Most of them have specific learning difficulties, they are demotiveted and discouraged. . I'm looking forward to understanding how PBL work effectively and how I will be able to help my student to become more self confident in their potentiality.
Introducing Project-Based Learning in your Classroom
M1.1 : What is PBL and why use it
I think PBL is the right method to develop students ' competences. Solving problems or doing real tasks help them to develop their abilities and skills.. I have been experimenting new ways of creative teaching and learning that focus on developing students’ language skills through creativity, critical thinking and collaboration among peers. . I believe that PBL is very appropriate to my current teaching context. I think it is time to change our approach,as teachers, with our students. First of all we need to get down of our chairs and help our students in doing something they care. They become self confident and we are their co-workers. So they learn doing something they like and in which they feel involved. For example, you are a foreign language teacher and why don't you ask your student to do their homework using other tools, such as recording their voices, making slides or videos and so on?
1.2. Why do I Use PBL?
Project-based learning is a comprehensive instructional approach to engage students in sustaing cooperative investigation (Bransford & Stein, 1993).
Within its framework students collaborate, working together to make sense of what is going on. Project-based instruction differs from inquiry-based activity most of us have experienced during our own schooling -- by its emphasis on cooperative learning. Inquiry is traditionally thought of as an individually done, somewhat isolated activity. Additionally, project-based instruction differs from traditional inquiry by its emphasis on students' own artifact construction to represent what is being learned.
Students pursue solutions to nontrivial problems by asking and refining questions debating ideas making predictions designing plans and/or experiments collecting and analyzing data drawing conclusions communicating their ideas and findings to others asking new questions creating artifacts (Blumenfeld et al., 1991).
M 1.3. : Reflections On My Current Teaching Practice
I think school is a place where students can “build” their own learning content and demostrate how creative they are. My collegues and I we involve them in projects that aim at engaging them in critical thinking and problem solving . It insn't easy to promote students' collaborative skills. They always waste time in worthless discussion.
M 1.4 Five Keys Components of Good PBL
Real-world Connection - authentic and meaningful activities that students do and real audience. Core to Learning - metacognition - they are aware of their learning, of what they're learning. Collaboration - students work in team and share responsibility for their learning and the final product.
The teacher is only a facilitator, students are involved in their their learning. Learning path is very carefully scaffolded through teacher 's hints but not answers.
Multifaceted Assessement -An integrated assessment thorugh the wholeproject , formative assessment, small check list to see students learning progress and at the end peer assessment which is important too.
The most challenging of the 5 components in my teaching context is that students still prefer to listen passively. They want me to ask questions to which they would give simple asnwers. They don't question the information they are given nor explore it any further. They do not initiate new questions and new information. They don't see learning as something that belongs to them nor something that they should own. There are two essential components of projects:
1. A driving question or problem that serves to organize and drive activities, which taken as a whole amount to a meaningful project
2. Culminating product(s) or multiple representations as a series of artifacts, personal communication (Krajcik), or consequential task that meaningfully addresses the driving question. (Brown & Campione, 1994).
Now I'm thinking what driving question is important for my students and for me to start my project. In the next hours I'll try to write down the driving question of my project.
M 1.6 - Your PBL Design: Formulating your driving question Here my driving questions: HOW have social network changed our life'?
STUDENTS' AGE 14-15
SUBJECTS INVOLVED ITALIAN , ENGLISH, MATHS AND PHOTOGRAPHY CITIZENSHIP
LEARNING GOALS: knowledge of the risk linked to a bad use of social networks
2. Developing effective collaboration for PBL
- COMING TOGETHER IS A BEGINNING,
- KEEPING TOGETHER IS PROGRESS,
- WORKING TOGETHER IS SUCCESS by Henry Ford Collaboration means working together in pair or in group to achieve shared goals through different tasks and using different skills and strategies.
Good collaboration facilitates the execution of projects, improve team learning, creates better working condition.
2.2 What is effective collaboration?
M.2.5 How can we build students collaboration
- In this activity, team members trade pieces of playing cards to put together to complete cards.
- This activity is useful build communication and negotiation skills Materials
- Playing cards – use between four and six for each student.
- I cut each playing card into half diagonally, then in half diagonally again, so you have four triangular pieces for each card.
- I mix all the pieces together and put equal numbers of cards into as many envelopes as you have teams.
- I divide students up into teams of three or four.
- I Give each team an envelope of playing card pieces.
- Each team has three minutes to sort its pieces, determine which ones it needs to make complete cards, and develop a bargaining strategy.
- After three minutes, I allow the teams to start bartering for pieces. People can barter on their own or collectively with their team. Give the teams eight minutes to barter.
- When the time is up, count each team's completed cards. Whichever team has the most wins the round.
- After the activity, I ask students of each group to think about the strategies they used considering these questions:
- Which negotiation strategies worked? Which didn't?
- What could they have done better?
2.6 P2P - Building your PBL Learning Design
How Social networks have changed our life?
https://v.gd/q4otNr
https://v.gd/CrBMwN
module 3
Developing student-driven activities for PBL
Resilience
'Briefly describe a situation in your professional or personal life where you were first unsuccessful but because you stuck with it you succeeded in the end. Finish by identifying why you stuck with the problem/task and did not give up.' (from the PBL course - Tearcher Academy)
I think resilence is an important ability it allows to afford all life difficulties.
My life has been very difficult but thanks to my resilience I was able to deal all negative or hard experiences. After graduated I could't find any work So I decided to attend a post graduated university course to became a professional teacher. It was a very strenuous period because I had three sons and the last one was a baby of two years old. I like very much my job, becoming a teacher was my dream and I didn't want to fail. At least I passed the final exams at the university course and I succeded in becoming teacher. I appreciate a lot my job because it was so hard to achieve it and I am very empathetic towards my students : I know what are the sacrifice and the efforts they do to reach their school goals.
3.3 An Entrepreneurial Mindset
The course moderator Kornélia Lohyňová gives an overview of what entrepreneurial mindset entails, how it links to PBL and how teachers can be teacherpreneurs in the video below.
3. Developing student-driven activities for PBL
REVIEWS RECEIVED FOR TLAs
"I read your Learning Design with great interest. I think the driving question is clear and involving and the aims and activities are chosen accordingly. The ICT tools used (Tricider and Padlet) are collaborative and suit the purpose of their use. I particularly like the alternation of the activities types, the producing of achecklist for safe internet use and the ideas for a possible end of the film. I think you might add more on the evaluation in the next module, as we will probably learn more on PBL evaluation. I really think it's a very good design! As a suggestion, if you are not familiar already with the Web WeWant project, I think it could be useful to take a look and get ideas and tools. from Irina
MODULE 4. Assessing PBL
My assessment context.
I teach in a Vocational Education School. In my school students' assessment consists of the risults of written and oral tests , two or three in each term and of the outcomes from their learning process, the improvement in owernship, indipendence and active participation to didactic activities.
4.1 Teachmeet - Mon 27th June 18:30h
4.2 Embedding Assessment into PBL
For formative assessment I use Rubrics. They are very important because they give information to students on how their work should be done. Moreover I think rubrics help teachers teach,andstudents learn. They can be used with many different tasks, focusing on the students' knowledge and skills The can describe student performance
4.3 Peer Assessment for PBL
The process of peer assessment or peer review can be a powerful learning activity for the reviewer and the reviewee.
Group work can be more successful when students are involved in developing the assessment process. The main aims of self and peer assessment are to: increase student responsibility and autonomy; lift the role and status of the student from passive learner to active leaner and assessor; involve students in critical reflection; develop in students a better understanding of their own subjectivity and judgement. Peer assessment encourages student involvement and responsibility; focuses on the development of student’s judgment skills. Above all students are involved in the process and are encouraged to take part ownership of this process.
4.4Creating & Using Rubrics for PBL Assessment
Rubrics are grading tools that can be used for summative as well as formative assessment and they are also a very useful tool to help students with self- and peer assessment. While they can be used for grading, they should in fact be seen as a learning resource that is used by students throughout their work. Rubrics lend themselves especially well for PBL because they can capture a complex range of criteria in an organized and clear way.
4.5 P2P - Your PBL Learning Design
created a PBL Learning Design and received feedback on the design, which so far includes aims, learning outcomes, short description activities that support group work and the development of collaborative skills activities that scaffold for student independence and ownership
4.6 Extra Webinar 5th July - Flip Your Students' Role in PBL
The webinar explored the role of students in PBL based on the experience of a team of university students experimenting with PBL. The aim of their work was to find other students and teachers in any part of the world interested to set up a connection based on a common topic, such as Science, Reading, Writing, Storytelling, School Life, Podcasting and so forth, and bring them together, so that they know each other’s needs and interests as to foster a more long-term networking pr
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