This is an example of what I am talking about in class. It is far more powerful when you see it! Imagine how powerful it is in action and make this kind of learning community happen for everyone! This is collaboration at it’s finest! Collaboration is about everyone putting their minds together for a better outcome! Students and teachers both benefit from working together. Interdisciplinary, engaging, collaboration, powerful! This is what learning is about and how it can be exciting and engaging for both the teachers and the students! It is real! But it can be very difficult to steer the ship and get other teachers on-board. Well you know yourselves as you sit there listening and thinking about how you are going to accomplish this, you yourselves have a measure of disbelief and resistance! I can see it on your faces. But I would really like to see evidence that you have given this your best shot at giving it serious consideration. It is a first step!

Just one example of how powerful project-based learning can be! Multidisciplinary, engaging, community oriented, life-changing!

How to get Started with Project Based Learning by David Andrade

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Scaffolding your Lesson Plans – Lessons Learned from Traditional Teaching!

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Kids are never too young to understand the joy of project-based learning! They are getting a great start to loving learning! What do you think?

Here is a really neat use of the Voice Thread application using the Doodle tool.

Another really interesting application would be to present the students with an essential question and they could debate the potential answers based on their knowledge of the topic you presented. This would be an excellent assessment of the knowledge the students had gathered from the unit of study.

One of the principals of connectivism is the notion that “Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions” (Siemens, 2004). I believe this to be true in that when one’s opinion or knowledge set is challenged it is the search for new information that feeds the fire of knowledge dissemination. It is at that point that one is searching for congruency to put their framework of knowledge and understanding of the world around them back into balance. It is this need for balance that drives the individual to search out new knowledge. The networking of information through the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 tools enables individuals to tap into and stay connected to sources of knowledge without much effort. We have become so used to rapid change in the world around us that we have a need to stay connected and informed.

For me as an educator, Siemens piqued my interest  with this stated  principle:  “Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.” From the time children enter school in kindergarten, teachers are encouraging them to see the patterns. This is a fundamental building block upon which other higher level skills are based in science and mathematics. It strikes me that if we taught all core content from this perspective that we would not only be teaching our students a critical skill, but a way to gain a deeper perspective on the underlying themes of all core content and get learning into the higher order thinking skills and away from the idea that learning is a task of memorizing facts and figures. That if students can begin to visualize the underlying patterns to math concepts, science concepts, social studies, information systems, that it could be the key to unlocking understanding on a deeper level.

ADDIE is a five step systematic approach to Instructional Design.