PBL Final Project Reflection

In education, it was often necessary to pause and assess exactly where students needed the most help and which tools could be the most beneficial to them. Increasingly, technology was one avenue that schools embraced in order to aid students and teachers in increasing student achievement, In fact, new tools are integrated in schools yearly with the hope that students will learn better using technology, a medium in which they have become familiar. In order to implement these new technologies, schools have opted to utilize project based learning models in order to implement technology on larger scales. One model that has proved successful was implementing projects on a grade-wide level or school wide level. In the case of the Tech Savvy Teachers group, a school wide model of Project Based Learning was the scenario for attempting to integrate technology in order to increase student achievement.

The rational of the PBL model for Tech Savvy Teachers was that many students in today’s schools, particularly low socioeconomic and minority students, have difficulty finding relevance in the standards and material they are instructed to master. The Tech Savvy Teachers’ group believed that if students can make connections from the curriculum to their lives, then they will have a better chance of mastering their standards. Therefore, the TST group decided to develop its project’s focus around the concept of getting students involved in the community. The group had math projects where the students had to learn to establish budgets for a variety of situations and measure materials for a playground; these projects required that they apply math skills learned in a classroom. In addition, for language arts, students were required to interview people in the community that could help them reflect on key themes and the historical context of the novel To Kill A Mockingbird.

All of the examples incorporated into the Tech Savvy Teachers Project based learning model had the primary goal of getting the students to realize how they would one day have to apply the skills and knowledge they learn in school to the outer world. When developing critical thinking skills, one criterion that is emphasized is students finding relevance in the material, which this project did. Additionally, this project was feasible because it required very little funding on the school’s part. The primary technologies that the teachers chose were Comic Life, MS Excel, MS Word, and Power Point, which were, with the except of Comic Life, all technologies that were already available on school computers, so they required no start up costs. In addition, Comic Life could be installed for a nominal fee that on larger scales seemed insignificant.

The Project Based Learning model was definitely worth utilizing for several reasons, First of all, it took the burden for implementing new technologies or initiatives off of one or two teachers’ shoulders and emphasized implementation on a larger scale, which resulted in the teachers feeling less pressure because they worked together and shared the burden of the work, In addition, it allowed teachers to take ownership and learn one new technology in which to become proficient, thereby having many experts for different technologies to assist each when it was time for the faculty to implement the project.

Tech Savvy Teachers Project Based Learning model was definitely a model that could and should be implemented in its model school because it created a support system for both students and teachers. For the students, it provided access to their community and encouraged them to build relationships in the community that supported their educational endeavors. The project also assisted the students in finding relevance in the standards they must master in the classroom and showed them how they would one day apply the skills they learned. PBL also provided an easy to implement and follow model for teachers to work as a group to make changes, which took the burden off the shoulders of a few teachers and redistributed the responsibility on all the teachers’ shoulders.