I can't believe I haven't blogged in such a long time! I don't have all that much to report at this point since we have been back from our holiday. Before the break, we were working on the Religion unit in Social Studies. The unit Jeff helped us plan went pretty well...most of my students were quite engaged in the videos and activities we prepared for them. Unfortunately, when it came time to do the actual project, they wasted a lot of time, some of them plagiarized, and a lot of them payed no attention to the criteria. I did get most of them handed in though, including JT's.
I was also working on an English project for The Outsiders and decided to give my students about 10 different options. They had a lot of fun with it and many of them did an excellent job! Some did get too caught up in the aesthetics and forgot about the content...that is still a problem that I continue to work on. JT also handed this project in on time. It is progress, but he continues to rush through the work and disregard the criteria.
I just introduced the same project in my immersion classes so we will see how it turns out!
I would love to see the options you gave and maybe some pictures of the completed assignments. If you post the options other people might see something they haven't thought of before. Sounds to me that Jt has progressed tons in that he is DOING the work which is very cool. Now maybe comes the scaffolding step where he shows you his work during the process so you can keep him on track throughout. Nice to have you back blogging!!
ReplyDeleteFor the Religions project, we gave the students five options: a poster, a powerpoint, a brochure, a website or blog, or a comic or graphic novel. Most students chose the poster or powerpoint.
ReplyDeleteFor the English project, I had the students show what they knew about characters, important events and the author's messages. They had 10 choices: a CD soundtrack for the book, a photographic essay, a comparison poster (to compare the book with their own lives), a board game, a yearbook, a journal by one of the characters, character portraits (draw or paint three of the characters and write a paragraph that describes what events had a huge impact on them), a song/rap or poem, a shoebox of artifacts that represent information in the book, and a letter or e-mail to the author/from the author.