The focus of this week's discussion was the following points:
1. PBL and Technology
2. Rubrics
3. WebQuests
4. Project – Step # 3: Technology-related change
I had an idea about PBL and Rubrics before this and I have been using them every now and then. However, WebQuests is new thing for me. WebQuests are one of the technology-related tools that can be used with PBL. They no doubt give it a special flavor and a new way of doing projects. The difference between WebQuests and traditional PBL is that gathering the information is done now from the internet mainly. The ready-made formats available on some websites can save the teacher a lot of time and effort. WebQuests can be developed and given to the students in a hard-copy form or posted on the internet as a webpage on one of the websites that offer this service for free.
Similarly, I knew about rubrics before. The new thing I learned about them this week is that one can get help from some websites specialized in this area. Sometimes you can get a completely ready-to-use rubrics. This again takes off the shoulder of the teacher a lot of burden and saves him/her a lot of time. However, most of the time, the teacher needs to be judicious and needs to adapt the available ready-to-use rubrics to his/her purpose.
Rubrics help the teacher in evaluating his/her students' work objectively and systematically instead of leaving it for his/her overall impression of the work. Students here can not claim any more that the teacher has under-evaluated their work.
Rubrics also help guide the teacher as well as the students throughout the process especially when these rubrics are shared with the students beforehand, something I strongly believe in; the students need to know how they will be evaluated and thus the teacher needs to develop the rubrics pertaining to a specific task and share it with the students before they actually embark on doing that task.
Finally, I shared the first thing I would do to effect a technology-related change in my situation. I got some sympathy from some of my course colleagues!!! The comforting thing is that I am not alone in this. Needless to say that I will try my best to bring about this change. All I need is patience and dedication. Change is always difficult but taking it piecemeal one can do it.
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Hello Abed
ReplyDeleteYour ideas for the Final Project were very interesting. As I have mentioned in my snapgrades feedback, be careful of trying to do to much, at least with regards to what we are doing for our final project for this class, and the report you will need to write about it.
Take one or two small steps in the direction you would like to go. What do you think is the most important first step for your students in learning how to use the computer? Email? An MS word document? Internet search? Posting to a blog that maybe you make, and they just add a comment? Start simple, and try it out. You can add to it later.
Robert