In this chapter we were introduced to the Finnish teachers who created a learning networking environment called Moop. This project spurred from their acknowledging that most students had mobile phones. The phones provided students with access to other networks and in their words, "went wherever the learners went." The teachers recognized this and applied this fact to a project that would combine all the aspects for an amazing project : instructional goals, accessible technologies, student collaboration and problem solving skills. This project was a great example of selecting and designing projects, the topic of the chapter.
It's important to be selective when considering project plans. It would be advantageous to collaborate with colleagues in your professional learning communities and to review existing plans. This way you can provide feedback and prevent any pitifalls from occuring. Pitfalls in the project design include an extensive amount of time being spent on the activity but less time spent on learning outcomes. While the activity is an important component to the lesson, the learning outcome is what is trying to be transpired to students so much more care should be spent on that. Other issues include overly scripted lessons with many steps. Students need to be able to learn some things by making their own decisions so lessons with too many instructions hurt more than they help. Technology layered over traditional practice and trivial thematic untis are two other possible pitfalls.
Using technology is not always the best instrument to be used in projects. While they may seem fancier and will often be more aesthetically-pleasing, the more important component of projects are that the learning outcomes are present and that the objectives have been reached. Additionally, I liked the example of the "apple" project that the author used. It is this thematic approach that is discouraged because of its lack of the other necesary components of a project. Features of a good project are that they are interdisciplinary, collaborative, and rigorous. However, one of the most important places where good project ideas come from are from the students themselves, just as how Weighill and her class began their boat project.
Students will tell you what they want to do and sometimes using their interests as the driving force of the project is best because students will be more enthralled in the project makig for a better learnig experience for them and the teachers. But good projects come from everywhere. New stories, current issues, classroom irritants, tried-and-true projects, ad those created from other teachers. Any of these resources can be used to come up with good projects. Another thing to consider is how to design the project. The steps to designing a project are to consult the framework and to make sure the objectives are aligned with standards, decide on a 21st century skill, identifying the learning dispositions you want fostered, establish evidence of understanding, plan the project challenge, and plan the entree for the project. This requires you to think about what to say to get student's attention and an asset map.
The steps and ideas that came from this project can be used in our future classrooms and even in our PBL unit. When selecting and designing a problem we can use the suggestions for finding good project ideas, which is maybe what we should have done first, but this information is still very helpful because we know which pitfalls to avoid, like the trivial thematic units, which aren't very helpful to our students' learning experience and we can institute the good features of a project that the chapter provided to ensure our project is at its best and will be helpful to us and to other teachers so that we may be able to share them with other teachers in our learning community.
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