Journal Entries Chapters 5 & 6

Chapter 5: Project Planning
For some of our students, the term “project” may suggest something that is “fun” or “long hard work”. For me as a student, it evoked “terror”! In the era and country that I grew up in (eons ago), I never worked on projects! My education followed a regimented schedule of academics in a didactic way. Therefore the first time in my life that I worked on a project was in a college in New Jersey. It was a new learning experience for me, scary and confusing, especially when I was unsure on how to plan and complete tasks to meet deadlines. From my experience, I am aware how very important it is for teachers to plan projects very carefully so that students will be able to meet deadlines and project requirements in a timely manner.

Moursund (2003) recommends that "a good starting point is to do a needs assessment to determine (students’) background and experience in doing projects” (47). Teachers can start small projects at the beginning of the school year to evaluate how much students know. For example, I would begin the year by assigning students to write an autobiography of themselves using power point. Because of different learning experiences, some students may be very adept with this technology while others may not have a clue on how to use power point. For the students that are comfortable with power point I would teach them to transfer their presentation to movie maker, while I would structure the lessons to teach PP to the students that need assistance. Having recently completed a Production 1 class at Seton Hall, I will introduce blogging to my students the first week of class to set the tone for the use of technology for the rest of the school year. I have been posting assignments and class happenings on a district e board for parents and students. I am looking forward to creating projects that include digital story and podcasts.

If projects are not planned properly, students will be “lost”. I have learnt that developing an outline of the tasks to be accomplished in an outline format is very beneficial and helpful to students. I have followed a similar task outline as described in page 49 for an International business project that I gave to my students recently. The students had a time line for each ‘milestone’ accomplished and worked very hard to reach each milestone since they were graded on it. I was able to revise this project many times after giving it to previous classes and noting the mistakes that I made. In the same way, for our current unit plan project at Seton Hall, we have defined tasks and deadlines to help us achieve our goal.


Chapter 6: Creating a PBL lesson plan
According to Moursund (57), “an initial decision to use PBL in an IT environment is a decision to stretch, to grow, to learn alongside one’s students”. Indeed there have been times that my students have taught me how to use technology for my lessons. A good example is when I just started learning how to use the smart boards. Many times students would come to the board and demonstrate to me how to use this technology. I also learned a lot about using power point from my students.

Since there are diverse students in the classroom, it is very important for teachers to structure the lessons to meet these students’ needs and to be authentic. In establishing milestones, teachers need to be flexible and make accommodations for unexpected events that may interfere with the deadlines like state testing etc. This is the first year that I have been experiencing great success with project implementation involving teams. I have teams creating and teaching lessons (team teaching), creating rubrics for projects and assessments and providing peer assessment as Moursund suggests on page 61. The students really enjoy this type of empowerment and they work hard since classmates are very harsh with their evaluations. In the beginning the students resented being evaluated by their peers, but now they receive the suggestions for improvement seriously and actually look forward to this type of assessment. I agree with Moursund that it is a great idea for team or students to develop a feedback form for students to improve on their projects (62). I will definitely be using this strategy in my next project.

Chandrowtie Sue Fermin
Project Based Learning
Journal Entries Chapters 5 & 6
Dr. Skeele/EDST 6306