CEDU 521 Week 2

This weeks emphasis on PBL was a nice follow up from the first week. The video from edutopia, narrated by Robin Williams, was a good one and made a further case for the value of PBL. The discussion towards the end of class on Feb 20th focused on the "end-all-be-all" of PBL. I guess I'd like to think that we, as teachers are trained to meet the needs of our class. We know whether a group of our students needs the structure of more formal work or whether they can handle the environment of a PBL. Issues of: How long should a project go? Who should generate the question? I think the answers to these good questions are going to be different from year to year to best meet the needs of our students.

CEDU 521 Week 1

Something that really struck me while working on the videos from Edutopia is just how successful these Project Based Learning scenarios are with children that wouldn't otherwise enjoy the traditional educational model, as well as students who could still do just fine with more traditional methods. By using technology with PBL it simply is a big motivator to a lot of students. My step-father is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who regularly works with at risk youth. As we talk shop he has continually maintained that schools need to rethink their approach towards education to better reach these students. Although he doesn't have a teaching background he believes that lessons in school should be more like a video game to better reach all students. I believe that these PBL can catch the spirit of the kind of scenario that he's describing. Indeed video game design in a high school in Washington DC was covered on one of the videos I took a look at on the edutopia website. I'd love to learn an application appropriate for use in my 4th grade class.