Project Work in a First Grade Classroom

I feel that this article is one of the more interesting ones we have read so far. Project learning does sound like a good approach to learning, and it seems like the students gained a fair amount from it. The quote in the beginning from the teacher who was also a mother struck me. She said she felt like projects were a luxury, and students had to earn their way there, and they had to learn the more basic skills before they could do project based learning. I understood where she was coming from, and that idea did seem to make sense until I read about the study that had been done. The children began looking at problems in different ways and forming more coherent, and less generalized thoughts and ideas. Instead of saying “I love my dog,” they moved on to talking about how baby chicks walked, or how they were able to peck out of an egg. Clearly the lesson made an impact on them. I believe that project based learning isn’t just important in elementary classrooms, and that high school teachers should be doing it as well. It seems simpler to engage children in this than high school students, but I feel as if hands-on learning is really important at any age.

Module 6

This article was a difficult read for me. It was not written poorly, it was just far too lengthy for my liking on a topic that I didn’t much care about. I feel that week after week we are reading articles that inform us how much we need technology in our classrooms and our workplaces and essentially everywhere in our lives. This is all well and good but how many times must it be said? These articles aren’t really telling me anything new. 20 pages to tell me that America’s schools are no longer the best, and that technology is needed in the classroom? I’m fairly certain I’ve heard that before, phrased in every way possible. Perhaps I am just being dense, but I feel as if I took nothing new from this article.

PowerPoint

“Death By PowerPoint” was an interesting article. I enjoyed the tips brought up by the author. I especially liked the point he made about the difficulty in annotating slides during class, and how that has been solved by presenting on a whiteboard. I have had teachers do this in the past, and I find it much easier to follow along with. Also, when someone is making notes to the PowerPoint as they go along, it helps the class to focus more. It is similar to getting a paper with the exact notes on it; students stop paying attention because they have everything they need in front of them. I must confess that if I know a teacher posts the PowerPoint slides online after class, that causes me to focus on the class quite a bit less.
The first article we read did not capture my attention nearly as much. It was well written, yes, but I felt that it applied more to elementary and middle school educators. Although it helps to have a broad range of knowledge in teaching of all fields, I felt that this article was not relevant. I was excited when I first started reading, because it sounded as if it was going to offer many new ideas of how PowerPoint could be used. Instead, I found that I already knew about many, if not all of the ideas delivered in the text..