This week we had guest speakers Donald Girouard and Shannon Horn come by the class, and they shared a ton of info and resources. But what really stuck with me was talking about making projects more engaging and interactive. It is such a simple thing and it seems so obvious but yet we as teachers still fail to do it at times. If you give students research projects, they are just going to copy and paste, probably from Wikipedia, and realistically they are not learning anything. Even though we know this is the result we still end up having them do research, I am guilty of it too. It seems like such a good idea, you think the students will take time, read articles, and find as much information as they can. But that never ends up being the case, because the students just want to be done as quickly as possible, which is why they end up copying and pasting. So the reason this discussion really stuck with me was it was just a good reminder that if we really want our students to gain a deeper understanding and for them to really learn, we need to make our lessons as engaging and interactive as possible.
Great Post Tim! I totally agree that we need to make projects and learning more interesting and engaging, especially online courses. I found that the one online course that I partially finished was extremely boring and was difficult to stay engaged. When they first mail out the package and you get the big book of straight papers and all the text books associated with it, it makes it really hard to be interested in the course. I think less reading and more interactive work is the way that online courses should be!
ReplyDeleteI agree Tim! Not all students have our love of learning so a lot of them will always to the least amount of work required of them! For this reason I think that it is important to teach students about essential questions and to have those guide their research so that they aren't able to answer them with a single Google search.
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