This week, I focused on learning what PBL was. It was really interesting to learn more about. We do many projects in my children's center with the kiddos, but I wouldn’t say it is PBL because we don't present the end product to anyone besides the classroom and the parents. I also will say that while I enjoy the age group, I feel slightly disadvantaged because I don't work with school-age children like most other teachers. But then I also think I get to do so many fun and awesome activities because we aren’t bound to the same restrictions they would have in the school district. This week one of the things that really stuck with me from some of the readings from the PBLWorks website was learning about the difference between “dessert” and “main course” projects. Based on the article, the lack of deeper learning in the “dessert” projects makes the two different. I liked the comparison since a main course is typically more filling than a dessert course. I’m excited to see how I can take what I’ve learned in this class and apply it to my age range.
This week was slightly challenging in the sense that I really wanted to be able to work close to my age range but I was having a hard time coming up with an idea.
This week, I learned that standards are still difficult for me to read. It looks and feels like a foreign language, but that's because, before this class, I'd never had to deal with them before. So I'm at a disadvantage when developing this project. I knew that trying to stay close to my age range would be tricky since I don't have experience with this type of curriculum planning, I'm learning something new besides the PBL course.
One of my favorite things that happened this week was during the webinar about creating your driving question. A question can be "too," teacher, I didn't really know how to respond to that, but I understand. You want to create questions your students can understand and feel comfortable answering based on their knowledge and abilities. It just gave me a chuckle to see that was one of the don't be "too" this thing.
Tools I Used this Week:
I found the Tubric tool helpful in helping me understand how to formulate a driving question. I like the option and how you could fill it in and try different scenarios for the questions. I wanted to use a new tool for the visual organizer assignment this week, so I used Miro. I really liked that you could pick different templates, and it was easy to use, which is super helpful.
This week