Ok, so I know I'm late in getting these entries in but please hang with me as I try to catch up over the next week. Things have been hectic in my life as my softball team made it one game away from going to state before falling a hair short causing me to put off my Master's work as well as my grading so now that we have 2 days of school left I'm trying to cram everything in and maintain some sanity. The worst part is that now that my season is done and the school year is coming to a close, my wife believes that I should be doing all the things on her honey-do-list that I've been putting off until now.
Well enough wasting time because I don't have it yet to waste. I can't wait until Thur. though when I actually have some free time to get all of this stuff done though.
Anyway, we were asked to research internet learning resources in Week 1 and that is what I will discuss briefly here today. In the beginning, when reviewing our assignments I thought "oh, boy! Whoooooo Hooooo, this is going to be fun! NOT!" Boy was I wrong, I actually did enjoy this assignment and found it very interesting and useful for that which I do. In my Engineering and Architecture classes I always require one research paper as a means of creating some cross-curricular instruction but I've never really spent much time thinking about where my students were getting their information from. This assignment really forced me to sit down and evaluate my procedures on this and showed me an efficient and meaningful way to provide further instruction on my research assignments. In addition, this assignment caused me to think about just how much research I actually ask the students to do in my classes and therefore caused me to think about restructuring my curriculum to teach students the proper way to research before going through the entire class with no clue. For instance, in my Architecture class I begin by giving the students the assignment of designing a home within 100sq.ft. of 2,200 sq.ft. under the price of $500,000. I provide them with 4 plots of land that they must research and price out when determining their plot. In addition, they must research the local building codes in that local. I also provide some mandates as to what the students homes must contain, eg. brick in a given sub-division or septic and water needs in another location. The students must research the costs associated with these requirements and then subtract them from their grand total. What ensues is students searching high and low to find given costs and me running around to confirm that their findings are accurate. If I were to provide them with a foundation for research before hand, this would greatly reduce my need to run around like a chicken with my head cut off.
I really liked Kathey Schrock's form for evaluating websites and modified her form slightly to fit my needs in the classroom. I think that providing this form to my students combined with providing them some new forms of internet resources like noodle tools, their searches will result in better data as well as create a more efficient method for my students.
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Ryan,
ReplyDeleteI am encouraged to see teachers outside the language arts classroom having students do research projects. :) Too often, I believe the onus for teaching writing lies solely on the language arts department, but I have always thought that reinforcement of research skills, regardless of the class, would help prepare students for their futures. Perhaps this would be a cool opportunity for you to prepare a joint project between language arts and your engineering and architecture classes. That way, you could grade for content and the L.A. teacher could hit the syntactical stuff that no one likes to grade. Students could receive a little 2 for 1 special with a grade in each class for one effort. I have tried this in some of my classes with decent results, so I hope you might take a look at the possibilities.