My process of the project sketch

It is with trepidation that I sit to write another blog. My mid-week experiences of publishing blogs lead to this. I certainly haven't reached the stage of "geeking out" with blogs. I'm still "messing around."

I have spent a good deal of time thinking about my project sketch and how to make it as useful as possible. I wanted a project that I could use, thus it had to fit in with the curriculum I teach. A good place to start was to look ahead and see what curriculum remained to be covered this academic year. Which topics/units would lend themselves to the introduction of new media use? What would/could be done in a way that we would be doing new things in new ways? And what would be actually manageable?

Here I ran into idea block. I started to look at the Global SchoolNet and iEARN websites. WHOA! These projects were huge! Daunting! They involved dozens of schools all over the world. That set me back for a few days, knowing that I don't have the time or energy left in this school year to pull off something like that.

With time came the courage to keep searching. I looked to my RSS feeds, including one for the Flat Classroom Conference. Here I found many examples of project products that students from schools all over the world had done and presented at the Flat Classroom Conference. Viewing these videos raised my spirits because it made is seem doable to carry out a project using new media (OK, new for me!).

Then I started to think about what kind of videos would students be able to make with maybe the fewest technical glitches, hangups or hiccups? And I remembered the clip, 'The Networked Student,' shared with us during the first Saturday F2F (face to face) meeting. This style of video seems it may appeal to students because they don't have to appear on camera themselves, they don't necessarily need to be great artists and they could add the audio easily after the video is shot. I won't limit students to doing their projects in this style, but for some it may be an appealing alternative to the types of videos they may have made previously.

At this point my project sketch was coming together. I cross-referenced my idea with the list of qualities the best projects share described in chapter 4 (Strategies for Discovery) from the "Reinventing Project Based Learning" handout from the class readings to see if I would at least hit a few of these. You can see the authors' blog here. Finally I checked the NETS. It was nice to see that my idea would align with several of the NETS for students.

Now what lies ahead is to finalize the idea and see if the technology will be available for the time frame in which my students would need it for completing this project.

Yes.... moving in the right direction is satisfying! In a future blog you will find the link to my final project wiki!