Evaluating Project-Based Learning

by Michael Hernandez via Edutopia

Last year I took a group of students to Cuba to produce documentaries about the island nation's culture and history. The main objective was learning how to produce documentaries, but one of my students learned a much more powerful lesson through the process. After completing her project, she posted it publicly to YouTube and received critical comments from someone living in Cuba. The feedback from an audience member in another country profoundly affected her, making her aware of what she was missing in her piece, and the impact that her work can have on others.

No test, grade, or teacher evaluation could have come close to helping her learn that deeply, and it made clear to me how important it is for teachers to reexamine why and how we grade our students if we truly care about their success.

As collaboration and project-based learning become preeminent ways of teaching and learning, many teachers struggle with how to evaluate these types of lessons. Traditional methods of evaluation, which have many flaws on their own, are not well-suited for interdisciplinary, multi-modal learning. Teachers need ideas for encouraging students, providing meaningful feedback, and setting students up for success. Read the rest of the article.

#yhstechtips

The Library of Congress Is Uploading 75 Years of Poetry and Literature Recordings

Yesterday selections from the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress became available to stream online for the first time — the launch of a project digitizing some of their 2,000 recordings from the past 75 years of literature.

4 Ways to add Clipart to Google Docs

Eric Curtis shares options that are great for students creating stories, reports, projects, posters, and more, as well as teachers making instructional material, hyperdocs, templates, and such. In addition, all of these options allow you to respect copyrights and teach students about the proper use of media.

2 creative ways to use Google Slides in education

Greg Kulowiec shares 2 ideas for using Google Slices, including Choose your Own Adventure

Fun with Photos

An online photo editor - Pho.to lets you add effects, edit and add animation to your pictures. Want to see a face in a photo change expressions and emotions? Upload a portrait photo and create a gif animated face online. Use picture to cartoon effect to get more fun!



This site has been added to the list of Tools for Digital Creations

Essential Classroom Tool: The Selfie Stick

From Alice Keeler's Blog: A selfie stick is a telescoping pole that allows people to put their phone at the end and take a picture of themselves. The selfie is a modern form of art. Selfies are part of the modern culture. Ask a student to show you their photo roll (do not really do this, you probably do not want to see their pictures) and likely it is full of selfies.

We have selfie sticks and smart phone tripods in the Library that you can check out.

Hyperdoc: Unsolved Case, The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe

This lesson uses research, questioning, critical thinking, collaboration to dig deeper in to the content.

Essential Question:  What is most important in this text? How can I tell? What questions should I ask about the text?

Created by @MsMarshallCMS 

Padlet of her other #hyperdocs

Pixar and Khan Academy Release Free Online Course for Aspiring Animators and Math Teachers

This new series of behind-the-scenes introductory videos and online exercises introduces computer science fundamentals by taking a closer look at the tools Pixar engineers and artists use to craft some of your favorite animated movies. There are two series with a couple dozen videos each which give the animation nerds in your life, young and old, a chance to get a sense of what it’s like to work at Pixar.

This new release follows on a successful inaugural season of a dozen of lessons that touch on the math behind the movies, like how parabolas are helpful in modeling grass in Brave or how combinatorics helped Pixar build a diverse crowd of robots in WALL-E.

Pixar in a Box

Educator's Guide

NASA’s Giving Away Brilliant Space Travel Posters For Free

These WPA-style artworks from NASA’s design studio are wonderful. And they’re free, too.

Hyperdoc: The Silk Road

This lesson is both project based and game based. Students do research and create games based on the Silk Road. It was created by @MsMarshallCMS

Virtual Field Trips

Links from a session about Virtual Field trips at the #DLDMedfield (Digital Learning Day at Medfield High School

Hyperdocs: Interactive History Lesson

This is an example of an interactive lesson done by @slogue89 in Google Slides. It's called a hyperdoc because it links out to a number of other tools including Google Docs and Peardeck.

You can search for more examples on Twitter (you do not need a Twitter account to do this.) using the hashtag #hyperdocs

Time Magazine Template

Steven Katz used sGoogle Draw to put this together, and included instructions & links to real Time covers on the drawing. Click on the image below to make a copy of the template.

My Maps

Did you know there is a collaborative mapping tool built right in to Google Drive? You can create some interesting maps with video and picture place marks along the way. The map above shows the territory under the rule of Genghis Khan and the Silk Road. It was made by 8 9th graders in social studies class. to get started, here's a cheat sheet.

Resources and Downloads to Facilitate Inquiry-Based Learning

From Edutopia: 

Find information, strategies, protocols, and tools -- including resources and downloads from teachers and schools – to promote curiosity and engage students in asking questions, thinking critically, and solving problems.

Creating Comic Strips with Google Slides

From: http://ti.apps.sparcc.org/videopd/20151215-slides-comics

Creating comic strips can be a great way for students to tell stories, express understanding of content, give reports, and be creative. There are many tools available for making comics, but a great one is Google Slides. Learn how to use Google Slides, including many of the newest features, for your students (and you) to create online comic strips.

Jeopardy Game Templates for Google Slides

The key to making a Jeopardy game is to use the "Link" tool in Google Slides. Normally a slideshow is designed to be viewed sequentially, one slide followed by the next in order. However, Google Slides allows you to put links in slides that can link to any other slide in the presentation, regardless of order. By using links to other slides, a presentation can be created that is non-linear, in which the user can choose which slides to view.

Directions

10 engaging Google Drawings activities for classes

Google Drawings is like a digital poster board. Or sheet of paper. Or a blank slate waiting for your great ideas. As versatile and powerful as it is, there are bound to be lots of uses for it. Here are the top 10 from Ditch That Textbook.

More information on using Google Draw is here.

16 Things Teachers Should Try in 2016 [infographic]

What are your goals for 2016? There are so many new and exciting things to try both in and out of the classroom. So Casey Bell at Shake Up Learning put together a list of 16 Things for Teachers to Try in 2016 to help inspire educators to try something new this year. What will you try? What would you add to this list?