Chapter 4 RR

Chapter four discussed strategies for discovery and how teachers can integrate technology into the classroom. This chapter discusses how teachers should plan for projects that students will be creating. There are many reasons why projects don't work out as planned and sometimes it stems from the very beginning and how the project was put together. There are four major pitfalls that this chapter discusses that have an effect on how good the project will or will not be for the students. 1. Long on Activity, short on learning outcomes. This pitfall is stating that these types of projects can be long and a lot of busy work but they only reach a small or lower order learning aim. These are the projects that are a waste of time for the students and the teacher. The students should be learning more from the project than what they could learn from one short lecture or from reference material. Teachers should take these limited idea projects and figure out a way to enhance them so they aren't a complete failure! 2. Technology layered over traditional practice. If the sole purpose of using technology is just to dress up what could otherwise be created without the technology while doing a research project then it is useless. Teachers need to make sure that they are integrating 21st century technology into the projects for students so that they are learning how to research online and become connected with print rich data and primary resources. 3. Trivial thematic units. When using thematic units in the classroom such as apples in the Fall, teachers tend to just add pictures of apples to every subject. In order to use a thematic unit correctly, the teacher should be having a farmer come in to explain how to harvest apples, where they come from, the process of how they get from the orchards to our tables, having the students interview the produce buyer in a household, polling students to find out which type of apple is their favorite and then creating a class graph out of the data to display their results. Those are all examples of how to have a successful and meaningful theme in a classroom. 4. Overly scripted with many, many steps. Giving students too many directions can hinder the quality of the overall project in a classroom. If all students are creating a "cookie cutter" project in the end or the results don't equal out to the amount of work that had to be done to get to the end then the teacher needs to reevaluate the project they are having their students work on.
The information in this chapter will help us with our project on preservatives because we will be able to create a project that will help the students learn about preservatives using 21st century technologies. The four major pitfalls are techniques that we can keep in mind and question ourselves to see if our project falls into those pitfalls or not.