Business Plan Project--Day Two

Day two of the project was very similar to day one. Out of five classes I think only two groups filmed anything. That does not bode very well for everyone finishing by the end of day three.

After day one, I was a little surprised at how little progress some students seemed to have made. I was under the impression that they had had class time on Monday to get started, and yet it seemed that a large number of groups were just starting on the background work on Wednesday when I joined the class. I was beginning to think there must have been some other part to this project that they had already done that had taken up the class time on Monday.

I asked the teacher about this because I wanted to know about any other parts of the project. It would make for a more complete blog, and probably give me ideas to help out other teachers. I was very surprised by his answer.

All the students have to do is what I was already aware of: decide what type of company they are running, name it, give it a slogan and a logo, research start up and recurring costs, write up a summary and proposal of what the business, costs, and profits are, create a floor plan, and create promotional materials including a commercial.

But, they have had a month.

The only class time they had was Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. But they have had a month. Last year, with the same project, the teacher said some student were turning in complete projects a week after it was assigned. This year, no students worked on it at all outside of class, and therefore had nothing done at all before they were given class time. Presumably, students were still debating on types of companies and names for a large part of class on Monday. They had not even done that much outside of school. The teacher attributes the change to just the overall differences of his students between last year and this year. Last years students were a bit more motivated to take initiative and work outside of class. This years students rely more heavily on having in class time.

I have a better understanding now of why he is sticking so strictly to the due date. The students could have borrowed the camera and started on the video at any time prior to this week. The students could have even more easily accomplished a lot of the other aspects of the projects and had all this week to create and edit videos. Instead, they are all trying to cram what is essentially a month long project into four days.

A lot of the business plans are actually very interesting, so it is a shame that there was so much put off to the last minute.

Mostly in class today I was helping students with programs other than Movie Maker. I helped out with a lot of Word and Excel questions.

Another lesson in this project is the very authentic and very real world concept of time management, which is something I tried very hard all day to reinforce. Students have a limited amount of time in which to accomplish several tasks. They can work over the weekend, but they will not have video equipment and they may not be able to easily meet in person. I was trying very hard all day to convince groups to work on some of the other parts of the project--figuring that researching costs and drawing floor plans can easily be done from home and easily collaborated on over the internet--and work on the video in class. I was not at all successful.

Sight Project--Assessment Day Four

Final day of this project.

It didn't take us long to finish up the grades. We had to watch two more movies that hadn't been played in class because the creators had been absent that day.

After finishing grading, we talked a little about doing the project next year. She wants to do it again, which made me happy. Then, because its a real possibility, I asked her if the grant ran out and there was no coach next year, if she'd still do it again. She thought for a minute, but said she would. She decided the program is easy enough that she could guide kids through it, and, even though grading by herself might take longer, she could get it done. After all, next year she'd have a rubric ready to go at the beginning, and a better idea of what to expect.

I told her how much I liked the idea of having the kids offer feedback. I don' think enough teachers do that, and I know I didn't do it enough in the classroom.

One of the ideas that they shared with CFF coaches at boot camp was the idea that conversations can lead to being able to work with teachers. And here was the progress of that. While talking with her about the feedback, I remembered, and commented on her really unresponsive 7th period class. And we talked about how it was a problem, because without feedback, she wouldn't necessarily know where to go or what the class needed. And, you could never be sure if it was a matter of kids not wanting to talk, kids being shy about talking in front of the class, kids not getting it, or kids just being lazy. So I suggested a blogging project--where kids could think out and write out their answers before sharing.

She seemed to like the idea and asked how it would work. So, I told her about the other "blog" projects I'd done. I gave her the example of the Social Studies teacher who had the kids blog outside of class, and the English teacher who blogged in class (and I was honest about how horribly that went) and the other English teacher who blogged in class and assigned kids to respond to comments by other students. She seemed to like that there were a lot of ways to go with it.

She then said there were going to be starting Greek Myths soon, and she wanted to have them do something with writing their own "journey" story. I was tempted to say they could do a Photo Story, but decided she might be ready to be done with Photo Story for a least a little while. Instead, I suggested doing something like the 1001 Flat World Tales. Then, the students could work with a partner, write their story, have a partner leave comments for editing suggestions, read and make comments on their partners' stories, and edit.

She seemed to like both ideas. And, she really liked that I could offer to show her examples of each.

Sight Project--Day Two

Day two was a very productive work day for the kids.

A few kids needed some technical help. A few kids have decided to make collages in paint and transfer them into Photo Story. Some students still needed help with figuring out how to save files to a specific place, figuring out why they couldn't just paste a picture into the insert picture dialogue box, or selecting multiple pictures at once. For the most part students worked diligently throughout the class period finding and importing pictures. No one has started narrating yet.

I am a little worried about the three day timeline. Students were not given any set limit to how many or how few pictures they need, and so some have about thirty. I wouldn't be as concerned if the program was internet based. As it is, though, we gave students the url where they could download Photo Story, but not everyone has internet access, and not every parent is going to let kids randomly install software.

I talked with the teacher about the time. She asked my opinion. I told her that the kids were making good use of the time (better on day two than on day one), and that I didn't think most of them would get finished in time. The projects are due Friday, so they will have two days to work on them outside of class, but not everyone will have access to the software at home (and most probably don't have microphones). She agreed. She decided to continue telling students that they only have one more work day, but to give them a fourth day. That way, the will continue to work during day three, believing its their last chance, but they will have the needed fourth day.

Most students are still in the process of finding and importing pictures. Some have started to plan or put their actual stories together--thinking about what they want to say. I find that they want to get instant feed back before committing to anything. But they aren't looking for teacher feed back. They are looking for peer feedback. Its been a noisy project, but most of the conversations are about what they picked and why. I don't think most of them realize that these conversations are part of the planning process. By explaining what and why to classmates, they are preparing to record those same thoughts.

Cell Project--Day Five

I really was going to post about the project every day--but I got busy with actually doing stuff. I haven't gone through all of the finished wikis yet, so its too soon to say if this was a success or not. So I'll just talk about things that went well and things that need to be improved.

This was my first large scale wiki project. So a predictable problem was that I didn't have all of the answers. Not that much of an issue in my opinion. The teacher gets to see that I don't know everything--which hopefully is encouraging (in that all this stuff if learnable). Also, the kids had to see me work through things. I tried as often as I could to let them actually do as I thought (although I'd say I did all the doing more often than not). But I would try to at least explain what I was doing, or why, or why something would or wouldn't work the way they wanted.

The project went better in some classes than others. I think that's always the case. Children did work on dividing up work and working collaboratively. They had to deal with issues of finding information and media resources. I'm not sure how well they did on review or evaluating media resources, though.

We hit some massive snags along the way--including the wireless going down and wikispaces going down.

The teacher and I both have thoughts on what to do differently next time. She thinks it would be a good idea to provide key words that kids have to include--because they didn't really come across them all in their research. She wants to add more structure to the project.

I want it to be more interactive. Students were "posting comment" on the "my space" page by editing their own pages and pretending to be multiple parts of the cell. I think it would be good to have groups post to one anothers pages--that way you have to know your own part well enough to be it, and read someone else's page and learn their cell well enough to talk to it. I think I understand logistically why we didn't do that. Maybe next time, maybe not.

We had to pull together a PBwiki for one of the classes when wikispaces went down. The commenting feature would have been great for the groups to interact, but they cluttered it up with nonsense before the teacher and I had time to regroup and replan.

Cell Project--Day One

I went down to the Bio class for day one of the cell project. Some of it didn't go well, some of it did.

An overview of the project--we are having students create "my space" type pages using a wiki. Each group will create a page for a certain part of the cell. They will have to include bffs (the student names) hangouts (where its found in the cell) links (resources used) pictures, etc.

Today the kids signed on and began basic editing. In the first class for some reason creating pages didn't go very well. I would have liked to have tried a different method of page creation, but the teacher said she wanted to create the pages. It didn't take long to do. I think that had I been the teacher, that is the route I'd have taken, too. The first failure was a hassle, although we did overcome it. However, in that situation, with limited time, the last thing you want is to waste more time in another class trying to do the same thing in a slightly different way that might also fail when you have a perfectly valid fool-proof alternative.

I spoke with the teacher who is a little of the opinion that the children are more focused on editing things to make them look nice than on the actual research and info involved in the project.

Its a valid concern.

I've done projects with a fun or "irrelevant" element to them. I think I've found that even though kids will focus on the fun bits, they will get to the information and "meat and potatoes" of it. They just do the fun eye catching stuff first.

She has expressed that she originally wanted to have the students do the research--with old fashioned pen and paper--and then have them create the wiki from it. She has also said that perhaps next year she would have them fill in a pre-created format--with the information--and then let them play with and edit the visuals.

I also think that the "irrelevant" part of this project is not so irrelevant. Teamwork, collaboration, communication, basic computer literacy skills such as editing text and saving often, introduction to wikis, taking responsibility for their own learning, multitasking. None of this trumps the actual biology, but is it on the same level?

And more importantly, is this helping? Is anyone going to get anything out of this project? Are any of the above skills going to be taught or strengthened by this project. Will the biology info be conveyed? Will it be conveyed more effectively, or will children learn it any better, or even at an equal level, than if it had been done in the form of notes?