November 11

Education Blog Update

This week I looked back at some of the blogs I introduced  in previous posts:  21st Century Education Technology 's latest post deals with the web in the classroom, and since my school doesn't provide wifi, I decided to look for something with a more immediate application. The side-bar caught my eye with an old post on PBL (project based learning) driving questions.  I'm new to PBL and was completely unfamiliar with the term "driving questions," so I decided to read on. The description provided on the blog was helpful . . . .

The Driving Question should not give away the contents standards which students may not really care about. It should engage the students and create wonderment through relevancy to their world. It should drive them to “uncover the standards” Through carefully planned PBL the teacher then facilitates this learning experience.

. . .  but I still didn't feel I had a grasp on the concept. An example helped:

Compare the Standards --

Describe the important portions of the Constitution and why it remains a living document.

to a Driving Question:

How can we create a Public Service Announcement for TV showing why the Constitution is still important today?

Click here   for a few more examples.

This was highly intriguing, especially since I'm in the process of trying to develop a Project for a Unit . . . .but, again, I think it will take a lot more exposure, processing, and trying things out to get a handle on how to effectively create a Driving Question.

The second blog I looked at, Free Technology for Teachers   explored a few sites. The one that caught my eye was TinyTap, a site to create games for students. Richard Byrne, the author of the blog, lauded this site as being his favorite for creating games for elementary and middle school. I looked around and played a few games, but didn't find anything remotely fun or middle school level. Perhaps there' s a significant learning curve. It would have been nice had he provided a link to the games he found worthwhile, because there seemed to be a lot of really boring activities.

The Educational Technology and Mobile Learning blog posted the 6  best apps for language learning, which definitely warrants a glance. The one that interested me the most was Wordfolio, app "notebook" for accumulating all the vocabulary you've learned. Unfortunately, it was not available for android.

To sum up, the most useful information this  week comes from an old 21st Century Education Technology post about PBL driving questions. To be able to really apply it, though, I'll need to spend time studying the concept.

Now I'm off to see what my peers discovered!