Ethics of AI Project
AI is here and everyone is paying attention, including our students. Maybe they’re wondering how it can help them with their work, while still making room for their originality, creativity, and sense of morality. This project-based learning unit is designed to help them figure it out.
Collaborative Project Ideas
Working together to solve problems and create new things is a vital part of life, so it makes sense to practice it in school. The ideas presented here are for teacher-tested, customizeable projects that went well and got students actually collaborating, not just dividing up the work.
Engage-Explore-Explain Choice Boards
A choice board is a graphic organizer that allows students to choose different ways to interact with a particular topic. Teachers can require that students complete items from the choice board in a specific way, such as choosing one activity from each row or column. In this example, each column contains a different category of activities that ask students to engage with, explore, or explain somethng related to the topic.
Choose Your Own Adventure Project
This creative “choose your own adventure” learning experience gives students lots of voice and choice in just about every aspect of learning and would be perfect for a term project. A google slide deck template provides the structure but students choose how they want to learn, how they want to process what they discovered, how they want to practice and review, and how they want to share their learning.
E-Books
You’ve reached the end of a unit or year, and you want students to demonstrate their learning in a way that requires them to synthesize information, apply it in new ways, and reflect on how they have grown. To achieve any of these goals, an end-of-unit exam doesn’t quite cut it. Instead, have students create their own PDF e-books, packaging up some aspect of their learning into a finished digital product…
Curation Assignments
When it’s time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It’s what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn’t time for the higher-level stuff anyway. If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment.
How to Teach Collaboration
Before launching into literature circles, fishbowl discussions, Socratic Seminars, or any other small group pedagogy, let’s teach students HOW to work together. Here are five ways to take the guesswork out of group work.
Infographics Project
A good infographic can distill a concept so clearly. Take a hugely complex issue and boil it down to a beautiful display of the most important stats, facts, quotations, and images. Creating an infographic is the work of an artist, a writer, a researcher, and a critical thinker. It is an ideal medium for our students…
Getting Started with Genius Hour
Do you find yourself searching for that one project that would truly engage your students? That would empower them to explore their passions? Do you sometimes feel that despite the many ways you are trying to creatively engage them, you just can’t reach everyone? Enter, genius hour. 20% time. Passion projects…
Student-Authored Textbooks
Student-Authored Textbooks What if instead of approaching vocabulary as something they had to learn each week, they approached their words as something they needed to be able to teach others? I’ve been fascinated by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine’s book In Search of Deeper Learning lately. One of the chapters is about a project at one high […]