Day 4 July 7

Today was very productive. Our group began to visualize what our presentation would look like as we gave it to the B.Ed. class. This was useful because it helped us create an appropriate sequence and also enabled us to review the elements that needed to be included. We used Inspiration to design our presentation outline and were able to represent the same information in the form of a flow chart. We then choose subject areas and explored the grade 7 outcomes from the NL department of Education. Our goal was to find outcomes that would relate to one area of the project. The area we choose in the plastic theme was the section of the web, which explored the implications of replacing plastic as a material used in our society. When we had a sampling of subject area outcomes made we posted them to our group blog.

We also posted our “plastic” web to the group blog and explained the purpose of it in terms of our project planning and its function in the development of Project Based learning in any context. We decided to include the B.Ed. group in a sample brainstorming activity as a means of illustrating the variations that would likely occur in any given student group. We felt that this would further strengthen the flexibility that is built into Project Based Learning. At this point our timing seems to be good and we should be able to allow time to have a practice run before the actual presentation. The challenge is to limit our elaboration or development to one area of the project while developing enough to give a sense of how useful PBL is in promoting creative problem solving, collaboration, facilitating creative presentation and the application of assistive technology. I feel that all learning styles and needs can be more easily met in this way than in more traditional learning models.