Chapter 5

Beginning a Technology based project takes a lot of planning on the teachers half, but it is well worth it if you plan right since students’ gain a better understand of the information through inquiry, collaboration, and research.  Some things to consider before starting the project include; resources, supplies, and tools that will be needed to aid students with the project, consider important milestones and deadlines to help students become effective managers of their own time, and team planning to support students as they go about many activities that the project involves.

When doing a project with Technology, it is important for the teacher and the students to have good management.  The book discussed the teacher’s management needs for tools and strategies.  These needs include: tools to be used to communicate with the students about the project, tools to communicate milestones or events to students, tools to notify students when there are changes, a method for getting resources to students, a system for managing work products, structures to support productive learning for students to be engaged in a variety of learning tasks at one time, and assessment tools.

Students on the other hand must form management tools and strategies when it comes to: systems and tools that help manage time and flow of work, systems to help manage materials and control of work, collaboration tools, methods for seeking assistance, ways to get and use feedback on their work, and ways to work iteratively and to see how parts add up to the whole. 

It is important for the teacher to think about different technology applications that can be given to students to help them on a project.  Some of these applications may be web-based applications; which include blogs.  The teacher should focus on finding things on the Web to support projects. This can be done through project wiki which will link a blog to your class to share the project with others.  The teacher can use ClustrMap to show Web visits from people around the world, RSS feeds so students are aware of project updates, links with multimedia, Skype to communicate, and links to a class Flickr site with project pictures. 

This is beneficial to our project and topic because weather is a tricky thing to teach through a long period of time.  For the teacher, it will be important for us to know seasons, and plan the best time for students to communicate with students around the world.  This is important when making sure those seasons will be opposite (summer there, winter here).  It is also important to be able to adjust the lesson when needed; for example, a hurricane is headed towards the Pacific coast.  You change the lesson from that week to teach students how to track the hurricane and study the effects it could have if it reaches land.