Reading Reflection #3

When finding the "Big Idea" for a project, one should consider ways to educate the students than simply through telling them what they need to know or reading the textbook. You should also try to cover more than one subject area and determine engaging ways to learn via Blogs, Wikis, etc. The 21st Century Skills are important to help students develop. If a teacher can successfully implement a well designed project then it causes students to stretch their intellectual muscles in way that traditional learning activities do not. Teacher want to use three high-order thinking skills and they are analyze, evaluate, and create. The framework for 21st Century Learning incorporates core subjects, content, learning and thinking skills, information and communications technology literacy, and life skills. I think that these are very crucial to incorporate into learning and help better prepare our students for their futures. One great way to involve opportunities for learners to become literate in the 21st Century sense of the word is by using true-to-life projects.

There are eight essential learning functions and they are as follows:

• Ubiquity: Find tools that help students be more mobile and learn wherever they want, whenever they want, more frequently, and with whomever they want. 
• Deep Learning: Help students find and make sense of "raw" information on the Web
• Making Things Visible and Discussable: Showing rather than telling!!
• Expressing Ourselves, Sharing Ideas, Building Community: Find ways students can use the Web to express their ideas and build society around shared interests.
• Collaboration-Teaching and Learning With Others: Tools abound that help us learn together.
• Research: Quality directories, search engines with filtering, a variety of bookmark tagging tools, and citation "engines" help students make sense of and organize what they need from ever-expanding Web.
• Project Management-Planning and Organization: Consider Web-based "homepages" or "desktops" that give students a space to work and associated tools to help them plan and organize.
• Reflection and Iteration: Using a blog can serve a s a personal diary or journal, where students put their thinking out on the table to give it a good look and elicit alternate perspectives.

For our topic/project we need to use our topic to cover multiple subject areas and we also need to find reliable sources for students to research the topic. The projects need to help students make sense of information and will give them an opportunity to share their ideas via PenPals.