Chapter 5 setting up

Before starting a project, you should look into some experts to help answer your student's questions and giving presentations on the subjects your students are interested in. Another thing you should look into is how you're going to organize all the information your students will acquire during the course of the project. And ways for your students to submit work to you. The students will need tools for looking up research. A place to work independently and store their work individually. They will also need a space where they can see other group's information. This will let them see other peoples work and gather their own ideas. Also it will allow them to work in partners or small groups because they will be able to see each others works. As a teacher, you will need a place to see and correct all your student's work and progress. You will also need a place to communicate milestones and deadlines for the project. A place for all your students information to be organized and easily go back to old work. Some great technology that could really come in handy for some of your student and teacher project needs are first a learning Management System ( or LMS). A LMS Like desire2learn for example, is a place where teachers can post instructions for the project, Post a timeline on a calendar for the milestones and deadlines, and give students a place to put assignments in a dropbox. Other great ideas for the project would be a wiki page. It will give your students a place to archive their work and progressively go and come back to what they are working on form any computer that they have access to. They can change the information they have gathered and see what others have added to what they have found. It could easily be the hub of your project. Also a blog might be useful for telling and sharing student's final work and how a project is progressing. A blog would update readers, like students parents and fellow teachers, on how your project is doing and get some feedback as well. For a student's personal work space you might want to consider igoogle, Protopage, my yahoo. All places where a student can save his or her work in an organized manner that he or she understands. I think that the personal student work space is a very cool idea for the project. I can see students keeping their food journals in there for our nutrition project or maybe me posting neat articles to share with the students on a shared learning management system. I can see many practical uses for all of the mentioned technology in this chapter. I am be coming particularly fond of using a blog to hear what others have to say and sharing information. Another thing that I wished I could figure out how to make work would be like a classroom twitter. I think that maybe individual blogs and following them might be the closest I can get but to just work in small groups and be able to more or less IM what's going on in that group would be great for teachers monitoring and assessing understanding.