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A tale of three projects
Ron Sherman shares three successful technology
projects conducted in his seventh grade class. Students completed a literature project, a
journalism project, and a culture unit designed using a project-based learning approach.
By Ron Sherman
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 n our class
this year we were involved with three different projects that used technology.
Each of the projects was conducted using a project-based learning approach that
stressed process and involvement over worksheets and busy work. We wanted to
allow students to choose the activities they did and how they did them. In the
planning of the units, we stressed structure and responsibility during class
time. This combination of clear expectations, tight deadlines, involvement, and
personal choice made for excellent units with terrific student
work.
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"We felt that poor structure would mean poor results, so
timelines were tight to keep them on task."
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 ur first project was a
novel study unit that was called Literature Circles. Each student in the class
was paired up with one or two others, and read a book from the grade seven
reading list. There were then several different activities they did to satisfy
the requirements of the project.
The Literature Circles Unit began with students
selecting partners, reading the book of their choice, and getting down to work.
There were several tasks for them to do in the unit, and we wanted them to be
organized and busy. We felt that poor structure would mean poor results, so
timelines were tight to keep them on task.
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 ach
student was given a package of instructions
and guidelines for the unit. They could work as fast as they liked
through the activities, but there was at least one assignment due per
week. Class time for assignments could be used in a number of ways.
However, if you wanted to use computers, cameras, video, or other tech
equipment you first had to show your plan to the teacher.
This kind of activity made for a busy classroom
during the period. All the kids were busy doing different things using
information from different novels, but all of them were doing things that they
chose to do. The structure and choices built into the unit kept kids busy, and
for the most part quite happy with what was going on!
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"Our project-based method was off to a good start,
and we were committed to continuing with it. It was this success that sparked
the creation of Romans Rule!"
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ach group was required to
complete three group activities and each person was required to complete three
individual activities from a list of choices. The individual activities were
centered around a Readers Log/Response journal which gave the students a choice
between six activities they could complete individually. The group activities
consisted of a wide variety of activities for students to choose from such as:
making a video in which the group acts out one of the major scenes in the novel
or doing a television quiz show about the novel.
We feel that the students really enjoyed this unit
and learned some good technology skills along the way. We had several good
Powerpoint presentations, videos, radio plays, and computer games submitted as
projects for this unit. As teachers, we were very pleased with the way we were
able to spend time with the kids, and teach them the skills that they wanted and
needed to learn in order to finish their projects. Each student got personalized
instruction for a small part of the day to learn something they were interested
in learning how to do to complete their projects. In the end, everyone was sad
to see Literature Circles end. Our project-based method was off to a good start,
and we were committed to continuing with it. It was this success that sparked
the creation of Romans Rule!
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 omans
Rule! is a social studies unit that is very similar to Literature
Circles. Students get to make choices, select partners and tasks, and
do multiple types of assignments. We wanted to make some improvements
to this project-based approach, particularly in the area of information
retrieval and manipulation. From our experience as teachers, we were
frustrated that most research reports were plagiarized, and that kids
didn't even know the basics of how to do a good report. The Internet
was making this problem worse. We knew that any good research report
had to fhttp://process, and that the information was secondary (at least
for grade sevens).
The main task for students in the Romans Rule! unit
was to gather information from the Internet and other sources to build a Culture
Board. The major task for the teachers was to teach the kids how to put other
peoples' thoughts and ideas into their own words.
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n order to learn a research
method appropriate to grade seven, students were required to do six sets of
"Research Notes" for this project. Each "note" was in fact 12 pieces of
information (a minimum of 25 words) each with a bibliographic reference. The
students had to provide the original wording of the information (usually copied
from the Internet and pasted into a Word document), and immediately beneath it
their rewording of it. Each student submitted one "note" per week for marking.
We spent a lot of time with the students on these to ensure they understood how
to do it, and why they were doing it.
Most students found these notes to be a tremendous
challenge. Not only did they have to reword others' ideas, but they had to
decide if the information was important to their project in the first place. They
became more selective of the information they chose because the rewording was a
lot of work, and they didn't want to waste time rewording information that was
not useful.
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 fter the
notes were done, the boards were assembled. All the students had saved their
notes to disk, so it was a simple matter of printing off their rewordings and
using only this information for the Culture Board. In this way, we were sure no
plagiarism occurred. At the seventh grade level, we feel that this is a high
priority, so we were willing to accept information that was imperfect in flow,
paragraph structure, or meaning for the boards. I don't think they'll remember
the content in four years, but they will likely remember the strategy for
rewording. And by then they will be more mature writers as well.
At our Culture Fair we had almost 300 visitors!
Each visitor got a question sheet, the answers to which could be found by reading
the culture boards. The question sheet had questions from each board, and each
group was responsible for writing the questions for their board. This sheet was
very useful to help organize and focus the visitors.
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"They were to complete the editing, reporting, photography,
and layout necessary to get a newspaper to press."
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 he 13
Times! Newspaper project (named for Division 13) was our final technology-based
activity of the year. It also built on the skills students learned in
Literature Circles and Romans Rule!, with some improvements. The new
goals we hoped to include in our project approach for this unit were
formatting and compiling text and images on the computer, writing for
different audiences, and using the Internet for multiple purposes. We
used the same basic format that we used for the previous technology
projects.
To complete
this prhttp://tudents were required to research, plan, organize, and assemble a
newspaper. They were to complete the editing, reporting, photography,
and layout necessary to get a newspaper to press. The guidelines for the project
required students to include various sections in their newspapers such as;
current events, sports, puzzles or problems, poetry, narrative writing, and
science or technology.
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his newspaper
project was done almost entirely on the computer in our lab. Students had
several different tasks to do with some choice and some mandatory work. The
Internet was used extensively, and kids learned about merging files, formatting,
and publishing documents with images and tables.
You can see a detailed description of our units,
with downloadable teacher packages, at our Millenium Web Site project http://central.sd8.bc.ca/mill_proj/ares/Ares.htm.
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