Project Based Learning Blog

Seventh blog entry:

1. In summary, what have you learned about your topic.

In summary, I have learned that project based assessment is a good idea in doses. You can't have your whole class be assessed through projects 100% of the time so you need to make sure that you have a decent variety of assessment types that you are using.

2. What are some additional, related topics you might explore in the future?

- Is project based learning a good alternative to test taking for ELL students or students with special needs? 

- Can I take project based learning and use it to assess myself?

3. How has the technologies you explored helped you in learning? What technologies were more effective and why? What technologies are you likely to use in the future? What technologies were less effective, if any, and why?

I've always been pretty tech savvy, however I don't think technology itself really helped me do anything differently as far as learning goes. Facebook, Reddit, and Discord were the most effective. These offered opinions about my topic in both directions but in a controlled manner. I will definitely use Facebook and Discord in the future due to their supremacy in the social media world. The least effective was Omegle due to the genitalia that was present and the overall lack of care from anyone on the site. I would not use that resource again. 

Sixth blog entry: 

What specific question(s) are you addressing with the technology in this blog entry?

To further my investigation into project based learning, I wanted to again go to the personal opinions style of face to face interviews, but this time on a platform I trust.

2. What technology will you be using to answer this question for this blog?

For this blog post, the social media platform that I chose to use was Discord.

3. Why did you choose to use this technology in general/to answer this question?

I chose to use Discord to ask the questions because for those of you that are unfamiliar with the site, it puts you into a live group chats with other people of your choosing. The website was designed for people to interact with strangers, or in this case groups of strangers that share a similar interest, and for this purpose it was great to allow for a wide variety of opinions.

4. How did technology answer or not answer the question.

So I want to begin this post by saying that Discord is great, has been around for years, and is far superior to Zoom, Google Meets, etc. I don't know why Discord wasn't the main platform people used for communication when the pandemic hit, but hey what do us gamers know about how to communicate with each other? The technology did not answer or not answer my questions. The questions that I offered this time was what type of assessment do you like best? The other question asked was "How do you feel about project based assessment?" I want to note that the group of people I was interviewing is a group of people that I play computer games with every night. These people know me and the flow of the conversation moved much more fluidly because of it. It was actually interesting to see how it unfolded because as the night went on I didn't have to even ask the question anymore. It kind of became its own growing topic in the conversation and as new people came in they were asked the question by people I had asked the question to. I guess the consensus was that we all agreed that there should be a better way of assessing children. They thought that project based assessment in the adult world seems perfectly reasonable and is kind of how it is already, considering adults get paid, (most of the time) by the projects that we do. 

5. What other questions did this technology create in your mind about your topic? Or did it reinforce your existing questions? If so, how?

I think that the question will always loom of the best method of assessing children. I think that this has made me aware of that fact, and I will treat it with caution in my future classroom. 

6. Important! After using this technology, what is your overall evaluation of it as an educational tool? Would you recommend it to other educators? Will you be using it in the future as an educator?

I would highly recommend Discord as an educational tool. For anyone interested in having meetings over the internet, as a public forum, file sharing platform, you could not ask for a better program. I would definitely recommend it to other educators as it is by far the META for communicating online, and I will most definitely use it if there is ever an online teaching scenario like we just had again.

Fifth blog entry:

1. What specific question(s) are you addressing with the technology in this blog entry?

To further my investigation into project based learning, I wanted to go back to my original idea of wanting to hear peoples opinions directly. To do this I would still be asking a) what the person being interviewed already knows about PBL and b) how they feel about it as a form of assessment compared to others.

2. What technology will you be using to answer this question for this blog?

For this blog post, the social media platform that I chose to use was Omegle.

3. Why did you choose to use this technology in general/to answer this question?

I chose to use Omegle to ask the questions because for those of you that are unfamiliar with the site, it puts you into a live webchat with another person, and that person has the ability to either talk to you or hit next and cycle to the next person. The website was designed for people to interact with strangers, which is quite creepy, but for this purpose it was great to allow for a wide variety of opinions.

4. How did technology answer or not answer the question.

I want to begin by saying that there were several people displaying their privates on this site so word of caution. After making my way through the penises, I was able to find a few people that were delighted to have a real conversation and do something that was helping me do this project. One person, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that project based assessment seems good in theory, but questioned about the people that struggle with creativity. She argued that some students would also just do the bare minimum on a project to meet the criteria for the rubric and not actually invest time or effort into making it something that they invested a lot of time and effort into. Other people seemed to agree that the creation of a project was much less stressful than test taking, and the overall consensus among the people I talked to was that everyone hated tests. This answered a couple of things for me. For one, the general population of adults that I interviewed between the ages of 18-30 was that test taking was the most dreaded part of schooling and so any type of assessment other than that would be an upside. The other question it answered was that project based assessments are not the ultimate answer to how to assess students. The one lady I talked to made a very good point about creativity and effort. I know as a student if I were assigned a project in school I would have made sure it was complete, but the effort put into it would have had to been dependent on the other things going on in my life.

5. What other questions did this technology create in your mind about your topic? Or did it reinforce your existing questions? If so, how?

I think that after using this site to investigate the topic, my overall question of the best format of assessing students is still up in the air, or is it really a combination that is needed?

6. Important! After using this technology, what is your overall evaluation of it as an educational tool? Would you recommend it to other educators? Will you be using it in the future as an educator?

As an educational tool, I think that Omegle should never be used. While generating random opinions can be helpful and sometimes eye opening, after the vulgarity and obscenities found on the website I would not feel comfortable recommending the site to anyone for any purpose

Fourth blog entry:

1. What specific question(s) are you addressing with the technology in this blog entry?

To further my investigation into project based learning, I feel it necessary to address any potential downsides that it may have as mentioned in blog post three. To recap, the problems mentioned were that if students are creating projects at home, their parents may be doing the work for them, and that some students might not have access to the same materials as everyone else and therefore it wouldn't be fair to those students. I'm interested to know now, since I'm convinced that project based assessment is a good idea, whether there were any more arguments against it or not.

2. What technology will you be using to answer this question for this blog?

For this blog post, the social media platform that I chose to use was Reddit. 

3. Why did you choose to use this technology in general/to answer this question?

I chose to use Reddit to answer this question because it gives the general consensus of most people. The way that the uptick works on Reddit, the more people that upvote comments have deemed what is said to be true. Things that don't get upvoted at all tend to fall in the category of false information or information that is not the general consensus.

4. How did technology answer or not answer the question.

One of the interesting things I found on Reddit came in the form of project based assessment being used outside of the classroom environment. The article I found was talking about how tech corporations now used project based assessment to hire people instead of having them interview. I find this a strange conversation to be had as well. The article listed the pro's and con's of said project based assessment and how when trying to hire someone can be a proven method of the candidates capabilities. This lead me to wonder exactly how project based assessment plays into our everyday lives. Doesn't the outcome of everything I do outside of writing qualify as a project based assessment. For example, if I'm painting a room in my house and it doesn't quite turn out right, my wife is going to come in and have me redo the paint because she assessed that my job on the project wasn't up to par. The other things I found on Reddit were conversations between teachers that argue that project based assessment can be good if students don't get projects in other classes etc. An argument against project based assessment that I found was that some students just aren't very creative and will do the bare minimum. It was also noted that if a student has a bunch of other projects than the projects can be overwhelming and stressful for the student causing them not to learn anyway.

5. What other questions did this technology create in your mind about your topic? Or did it reinforce your existing questions? If so, how?

This investigation certainly created a bunch of new questions. One I mentioned earlier is how is everything that we do not some sort of project based assessment on a larger scale. How we perform at work and home are always being assessed but not necessarily by some sort of summative test. In the next investigation I think I might dive deeper into project based assessment as a whole and not just in early grade classrooms.

6. Important! After using this technology, what is your overall evaluation of it as an educational tool? Would you recommend it to other educators? Will you be using it in the future as an educator?

As an educational tool, I think that Reddit should be used for devil's advocate, and finding opinions that differ from your own. I wouldn't recommend this platform for other teachers just because it is so specific in what you have to be searching for in order to really obtain any quality information from the site.

Third blog entry:

1. What specific question(s) are you addressing with the technology in this blog entry?

After reading the comments that I received finally on Facebook, I realized that I was asking to general of a question or the wrong question entirely. What I originally had asked was, "How do you feel about project-based assessment versus multiple choice or essay style assessments that are given." My question should have included assessments in the classroom, because a lot of my responses were about home. Many parents that wrote back said that as a parent that they would complete their child's projects for them and so it isn't actually representative of what the students know. Other opinions included that all children might not have the same access to materials etc. to be able to create projects. My line of thought with this investigation was more about how teachers could use project based assessment in the classroom as a means of assessing a student instead of the normal multiple choice or essay based assessments that are usually given. It also didn't occur to me to use Facebook for looking up information that people had already posted about the topic and I solely focused on asking the consensus of the people on my friends list. Todays question is more to answer how project based assessment can be used in the classroom. Today's question is what types of project based learning can be conducted inside of the classroom.

2. What technology will you be using to answer this question for this blog?

For this blog I thought it would be best to see what other people have used for this in the past. To do this I decided to focus on the social media platform Pinterest.

3. Why did you choose to use this technology in general/to answer this question?

I chose Pinterest to answer this question because Pinterest is an internet forum where anyone can post crafty or interesting ideas on ways to do things.

4. How did the technology answer or not answer the question?

The social media platform Pinterest not only answered my question, but overwhelmed me with ideas and crafts that could help shape future lesson plans for years to come. If anything what it did, was make me realize that when creating a lesson, I should first take the topic and look up something interesting that students could create to help them grasp the content. Whether what the product they make is used for assessment or not, I feel like this backwards way of creating a lesson might be helpful.

5. What other questions did this technology create in your mind about your topic? Or did it reinforce your existing questions? If so, how?

This technology reinforced the idea that project based assessment can be done throughout the classroom through thousands of different projects. One thing I do want to note is that it was also mentioned that project based assessment should be one of many different ways of assessing children. 

6. Important! After using this technology, what is your overall evaluation of it as an educational tool? Would you recommend it to other educators? Will you be using it in the future as an educator?

I give this social media platform a 10/10 as far as usefulness for an educational tool. I would highly recommend it to other educators as an idea generator for lessons or for a lesson already imagined and not quite sure how to pull it together. In the future I will definitely gather ideas on Pinterest for different projects that I can do in my classroom to help facilitate learning.

Second blog entry:

1. What specific question(s) are you addressing with the technology in this blog entry?

For this second blog entry I want to see what people online have to say about project based assessment. 

2. What technology will you be using to answer this question for this blog?

I will be using the social media platform Facebook to answer this question. I will ask the question to a group of my peers to see how they feel about project based assessment versus traditional multiple choice or essay based assessment.

3. Why did you choose to use this technology in general/to answer this question?

I think that Facebook is a great way to start this blog because it begs people to answer the question you are asking instead of looking for what people have already posted online.

4. How did the technology answer or not answer the question?

As it currently stands, nobody has offered an opinion on Facebook. I will update this if they do.

5. What other questions did this technology create in your mind about your topic? Or did it reinforce your existing questions? If so, how?

How much faith should I invest in what others are saying. Do I trust their judgement or will I reserve my own opinions and still think the same way.

6. Important! After using this technology, what is your overall evaluation of it as an educational tool? Would you recommend it to other educators? Will you be using it in the future as an educator?

I think that this platform is a good overall platform to gain consensus on how people feel about an issue. Everyone will have different opinions but I think that overall that serves us well in a sense that you will gain multiple perspectives about the issue and not just cater to one side. I also have a mix of people on my Facebook that includes parents and educators.

 First blog entry:

Project-based assessment

1. What is the problem? Describe the issue you want to explore.

The question at issue is whether project based learning can be more efficient in grading students than standardized testing is. I want to understand how project based learning and or kinestetic learning can better help students than other methods of teaching can.

2. How did you come to choose this issue? Is this something you have been dealing with in your life? If so, explain how it is impacting you or someone you know. If the topic simply interests you, explain why.

Ever since I began teaching elementary kids I understood that kinesthetic learning and using your own hands to come to conclusions is the best method of learning something for yourself. I've always been taught that if I do something for myself than I'll learn the process and the best method of doing it for me personally. This topic interests me particularly because I've always told myself that I can prove through demonstration what I cant on a random test, and I feel like most children feel this way too.

3. What is the overall importance of the topic? Why might this be a concern for education in general?

 The importance is that it gives educators and the people actually teaching the children the power of determining their true score versus their raw score. The problem is that the score is subjective and that the teacher may favor one student over the other and therefore falsify the accuracy of the results.

4. What do you know about the problem already?

I don't necessarily think there is a problem with using projects to assess the skill and knowledge of a child, however standardized testing has been proven to work to produce efficient results.

5. What are some other specific questions you have about your topic? Note: These specific questions are important in they provide the interesting subtopics you are going to explore this semester. You should have at least five questions. As you explore your topic, you would expect to uncover more questions.

1) How can project based learning be used as a more accurate method of determining a child's true score versus his real score?

2) Do the projects support intrinsic learning from the child and do they choose what is important for them to investigate?

3) Do doing projects create more lasting learning experiences than do worksheets or other tradition forms of testing?

4) How can we implement project based learning into a system that advances the child into future educational programs?

5) How do we teach teachers to promote project based learning instead of rigorous paper and pencil methods?