Chapter 9 Reading Response

Before beginning a project, it is important to find out what your students know already.  This helps you understand what has to be taught and where everyone stands on the topic.  In order to find this out, an activity called K-W-L is a great way to collect information.  The K is what you already know, W is what you want to learn and L is what you learned.  This is the most effective way to know what your students already know because you can record all the data and compare to what you need to teach.  It is important to establish anchors because you know where all the students are going to start and how much they will learn and work toward that one goal.  At the end of the project, it is always good to see what the students learned.  In order for this, students can do many things to show you that they learned something new and want to show it off.  They can create books, paintings, blogs, and portfolios.  There are so many more projects they can do because there are so many options through technology.  This chapter relates to our project because in the beginning of the project, we all input what we already new and started from there.  Then we researched and put together little projects to create our last and final project.  We are taking all of our projects and putting it into one big website for the final product.  That way we can see how far we've come since the beginning.