Em's Ever Evolving Erudition

Knowledge is not a destination, it's a journey. In this class, we definitely went through a journey. I learned many things that I can put into my professional practice. One really nice thing about this class was that we learned technology tools by exploring some complex ideas like inquiry based learning and project based learning. This way we didn't learn technology in a vacuum. Overall I would say that my time spent in this class is very useful as I have grown new knowledge and developed many lessons I can put to use in my classroom. Some of the projects that we did this semester really stand out to me as they were poignant in my learning and practice. One such project was when I worked with Holly to develop a presentation on Digital Citizenship. This was really good for me in wrapping my mind around this big topic. There are so many different parts to Digital Citizenship that at first I felt so overwhelmed but working with a partner totally made it manageable. I also rea...

The past three weeks have cover a wide range of topics and all important in consideration when planning PBL units. How do spark passion in our students? How do we use our own passions to ignite passion in others? How do we make sure our students have the skills to be a good digital citizen? And how do we do everything while making sure we are using best practice? These are essential questions that will help guide us in our design of effective project based learning lessons. We can create a well designed, planned out project, but if it doesn’t hook the students it can fall short of success. The students have to be engaged. They have to get the “so what?” of the learning. This can be done by thinking about passion. There are two ways to tap into passion. First is to find what your students are passionate about. One of the cool ideas involving student passion is the Genius Hour, where you allow your students to spend 20% of their time exploring a project of their own passion. Imagi...