Consumption Project

https://plus.google.com/photos/104665354261133320564/albums/5854582620766544849?authkey=CI39pPz3lf6FzwE

Project Outline

As I look back at this project there are some things I liked about and some things that need overhauling.

Liked:

-students engaged in quality research and fact finding to determine the rate at which a resource was consumed by a certain population at a certain point in time

-students were thinking critically about his to represent their model so as to bring the Math to life by picking a quantity that would be significant (for a certain population at a certain time)

-the project points to the global theme of sustainability

-models were engaging

-choice of topics, methods of modelling increased engagement

Bigger and better next time:

-sustainability is such a deep and far reaching theme, I want to make sure to do it justice in a project like this. I'm not sure exactly how to approach that, but for starters I'd either look at sustainable practices with respect to either the food industry or energy sector (rather then leaving the option open)

-again, to better serve the sustainability theme I want to make sure this project culminates in a real, applicable, significant prouduct. This could, perhaps, be something like a marketing project and pitch to a local restaurant. It would be really cool to get a sense of what a restaurant needs and how we can help th market themselves, or to help raise awareness of sustainable food choices 

-I could see using a question like "How do our consumption habits impact others?", or perhaps even making this more specific like "How does Canadian consumption of coffee effect Ethiopia?", but I'm not sure how the socials ties would be made, and that relationship may likely dictate the scope of the question and inquiry.
-as with other projects with a physical product, I've seen that getting into researching, drafting, and revising a model design early really pays off in the end. Along these same lines a goal I've been thinking of lately is to really improve the quality if sketches. I want to see students think through and prepare well for their sketches so they can approximate their product as well as possible. I wonder if a strategy here would be to have students actually prototype a scale sketch or model before constructing their final product.

Landscape Architecture Project Comes to a Close - Here is the Project Outline

Our final science project in our Project Based Learning Choice program was a school garden. We started with the plan to have every student planting and experimenting with veggies, but the project naturally became differentiated. Some students had to explore an automatic irrigation system, while others explored composting.

Their work is displayed on our KRSS Garden Blog.

A School Garden is Born: The Story of a Facilitated Project Launch

We were stoked to have Greg Jonuk, a trained facilitator, help us launch or #krssgarden project this week. Greg and I had been planning the morning for weeks in order to best give voice to our community and to mine their ideas, questions, and comments as best we could.

Here's the run down of the morning (for more detail see the agenda):

• "Teacher Talk Show" - Greg interviewed Beth and myself to give some context to the project
• "Press Conference" time for participants to share aspects of the project that excited them, aspects that scared them, ideas for what success would look like and questions about the project
• "Open Space" time for participants to:
• Respond to the prompt: "In order to have a successful garden at KRSS we need to think about..." and stick their ideas to a wall
• Shop for topics on the wall and decide which they individually wanted to discuss
• Discuss topics in small groups (this proceeded in three rounds after students had chosen which topic they'd discuss in each round)

We've now taken all the input from staff, students, and parents and combined it into a Google form. Now we can begin prioritizing our work as we plan on school garden!

PS. Sorry about the formatting of the linked documents, it was lost in the conversion to Google Docs

KRSS garden planning session from scchase

Information Literacy

I've commented before, that I believe literacy and numeracy are the foundational abilities we want our students to graduate with. The BC Teacher-Librarians Association recently published a document entitled "Points of Inquiry: A Framework For Information Literacy and The 21st Century Learner" in which they address some of the issues facing our learners today, and suggest a framework with which to better prepare today's 21st Century learner.

I love their Points of Inquiry Model shown below in which all aspects of the inquiry process are connected, but not necessarily in a linear progression. The document provides great goals and strategies with which to engage students in every part of the process.

I also really appreciate the comment that "educators recognize that there is pedagogical importance in 
hooking students into searching for ideas and explanations that create both meaning and deeper knowledge". I think this is underscores the importance of the inquiry/ exploration/ problem based process.

21st Century Fluency Project

An excellent site well connected into the world of 21st Century Learning. The project is build on a guiding set of "fluencies" and "elements" - a worth while read.

http://www.21stcenturyfluency.com/

Also included on one of the posts on the blog is this "bill of rights" for 21st Century students. I love the respect it shows for students and their learned methods of communicating and accessing information. I also appreciate the need is shows for the teacher in statements like "I need to be taught how to balance my life between the online and offline worlds". I believe this is very much where our students are at. 

http://www.21stcenturyfluency.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=2454