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Dora (13), Italia
TIPS
for Teachers-
Using
Interactive Tools to Enhance Project-Based Lessons
Technology has a wide range of advantages to promote understanding, provide feedback, reflection, revision, introduce important problems and foster learning communities (Williams et al, 1998). Using interactive tools with project-based activities can enhance and improve the students’ engagement, motivation and success.
- Promoting Participation
- Promoting Critical Thinking
- Promoting Metacognition
- Facilitating Submission of Ideas
- Facilitating Feedback
- Facilitating Production
- The Teacher's Role
- Additional Resource Information
Promoting
Participation
- Interactive technology can promote the participation of all the students minimizing status differences. However, moderation is often needed to prevent the manipulation of the technology related environment as some students tend to be more possessive and motivated to its use.
- Having an audience and receiving feedback from others is another motivating element of interactive technology.
Promoting
Critical Thinking
- By presenting the students with the opportunity to manage complexity and aiding production, interactive technology can be highly valuable to help students manage the production of their artifacts, and promote their using of critical thinking (Blumenfeld et al, 1991).
- Interactive technology promotes the possibility of working with others who hold multiple viewpoints, promoting the opportunity to practice critical thinking.
Promoting
Metacognition
- By helping students structuring the process, technology gives them the ability to easily manipulate alternative representations and therefore enhance their understanding and reflection of the process.
- Asynchronous environments provide students an opportunity to pause, reflect, and analyze their thinking prior to posting their information.
Facilitating
Submission of Ideas
- Enhancing interest- having the information presented in a interactive technology based form as the likelihood of increasing the student’s engagement and interest and consequently their willingness to present their own ideas, and a wider variety of ways to do so.
- Multiple forums for submission of ideas allows students opportunities for both synchronous and asynchronous work. Interactive forms and easily publishable forms on the Web allow learners to focus on the content, and not the technicality of the process.
Facilitating
Feedback
- Diagnosing and correcting errors- technology support can be provided to directing students to their errors or guiding them through the reviewing process. Moreover with the resource of technology the “cost of change is cheap, students can explore alternative solutions without undue expense” (Blumenfeld et al, 1991).
Facilitating
Production
- Access to interactive technology makes information very easily accessible and publishable.
The
Teacher's Role
- As Blumenfeld
et al, (1991) suggested,
- Technology supplements but cannot supplant the teacher in helping students do projects … its contribution depends considerably on the culture and norms the teacher creates, within which technology is used and whether it is employed as an integral tool in project execution.
- The importance of the teachers role as also been defended as essential for enhancing school achievement (Williams et al, 1998), technology can help the teachers to do their work but never take the leading role in instruction.
- Technology has the potential to be an extremely powerful scaffolding tool; nonetheless, the teacher is the single most important and ultimate scaffolding coordinator.
- Technology has a wide range of advantages to promote understanding, provide feedback, reflection, revision, introduce important problems and foster learning communities (Williams et al, 1998); but this will almost always be underachieved without the guidance of a good teacher.
- Furthermore, technology as been presented (Koschmann et al, 1996) as an excellent scaffolding tool to facilitate the connection of Project-Based Learning with the principles of effective teaching (multiplicity, activeness, accommodation and adaptation, authenticity, articulation and termlessness). However it should never be regarded as the answer to our problems, but as one more tool (even though very effective if correctly used) for the tutor/coaches to use to promote effective learning.
Additional
Resource Information
- Tools for Interactive Education: A resource for those interested in the power of interactive tools in education. This site includes discussion of interactivity, examples of tools and software that can be used, resources for more information, and links to research on the topic.
- Technology Supports for Project-Based Learning: Descriptions of ways that technology can facilitate learning in project-based activities.
- Teacher Reports on Effects of Technology Use on Student Learning: Themes that emerged during the cross-case analysis of case studies on interactive technology use in project-based learning.
- The Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education: An assortment of research work done on interactivity in relation to computer use and student learning.
Becoming
a Coach
|Asking
Good Questions
| Using
Journals in Project-Based Lessons
Assessing
Project-Based Learning|
Making & Mnaging Long Range Projects |
Using
Interactive Tools
|
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