This has been the most interesting two weeks of my teaching career. The students in my class are working on a science project. The project required written notes and then taking the notes and making them into a power point. It has been truly amazing how students have no idea how to make the written part become the power point.
They have made this project that started out to be fairly reasonable and easy become hard and impossible. The first thing that was easy for me to see is they have trouble taking the written notes and when we started this project in Science we were learning about QAR (Questioning) in reading. We thought that it should go together very well. WRONG! The good part of the project is that most of the students get right to work on the power point portion of the project. They are doing nice work and I can't wait until Friday when we are able to look at finished projects. I will say though that this has by far been the most confusing and time consuming project so far this year.
You have probably guessed by now that I will be looking into the written part of it and changing some to better fit the needs of the technology students that we have and will be having in our classes.
Have a good week. I'm sure next week I will fill you in on some of the finished projects.
Jo
Understandably integrating powerpoint presentations into projects are not only time consuming but often very difficult for students to do. Firstly, the students have to make their notes (which is actually the easy part, right?), but then students have to synthesize, summarize, integrate and summarize once more in order to have a powerpoint presentation. Getting the facts might be easy, understanding them and summarizing them in such a way that other will understand, well, that's the hard part, even for advance students. It is still, I believe a very good learning experience and gives the students some practice as to how the real world works (presentations are part of most careers). Good luck with the rest of the projects, I am sure the end results will be amazing.
ReplyDeleteI always love reading your posts because I love reading about an actual teacher's experience in the classroom. When I was student teaching, the students were studying different regions of the United States. After studying one region, the students were to choose a state and create a powerpoint on that state. My teacher said that they had done this before and that it wouldn't be too difficult. For some students this was very true. For others not so much. I dreaded Social Studies time during that week we work on them. The students had so many questions and I had to try to figure out how to help a lot of students in a little amount of time. I ended up having the students who finished early help the struggling students. This helped out so much! I felt like I was actually able to breath and I wasn't so stressed. Thanks so much for sharing your story and good luck with the projects!
ReplyDeleteI did a similar project when I student taught in a 5th grade classroom. When I first started thinking about what project I wanted them to do, I thought that we could research a person and then write a paper on what we learned. Then I started to think about the process it would take to get them to this final step. The students had no idea how to take notes so I taught probably for 5 days on different ways to take notes on books, videos, and presentations. I thought that it was especially important for them to know how to take notes since they would be going into middle school the following year. Although we didn't use powerpoint, I was surprised at how many students struggled to type out their papers. My students learned a lot from it & their final projects were amazing! It will be interesting to see how your projects turned out!
ReplyDeleteI have helped teach this project with subbing. The a lot of the students have no idea how to take notes. Then I thought back to my years in school and no one ever really taught you how to take notes, I guess it's a skill. I hope their projects turn out well. I can't wait to hear more about them.
ReplyDeleteInteresting.. in a sense, this is more about process than product! Although the powerpoint projects will probably be OK it is the process that the students are taking to get to the project that is important. Also, I think we assume that students "know" technology. In reality they don't -- we do need to scaffold these experiences a bit to help them with those skills - even making a powerpoint. But, in reality I think this was more about those note-taking skills. As you think about doing the project again - how would you scaffold the learning experiences so that the students would excel?
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