Project-Based Lesson: Intro: 6/22/08

Loni and I have received the okay to collaborate on this project. We chose to do this project together based on the ultra-collaborative nature of our team-teaching, double-classroom situation and on how our 2nd grade team plans and teaches collaboratively. This project will be used across 2nd grade at Kingswood Elem. School during the 2008-2009 school year.

To begin, Loni and I have decided to use and improve a culminating science Lifecycles project we taught this past school year. We want to use a "backwards design" approach by determining what standards, both content and ISTE, we want to base the final assessment on, and then create rubrics, both teacher and peer, to use for the assessment. We also want this project to integrate smoothly with the newly-adopted FOSS 2nd grade Life Science Unit: Insects & Plants which we will teach prior to assigning this project.

We will utilize portions of the project from this past year that apply to the newly created criteria and were successful, and abandon the portions that are not standards-based or were problematic for a large, culminating technology project. For example, the majority of 2nd grade students had no previous experience with the several different software products that were used in this past year's Lifecycles project. This meant we had to teach the students how to use 3-4 different kinds of software over just a few days as they were working on the project. For many students, it was too much varied information/instruction in a short period of time which led to a lot of repetition of procedural instructions and teacher troubleshooting.

We feel this could be improved by creating a yearlong technology plan where students have had experience learning and using at least 2-3 of the software products earlier in the school year before the end of year Lifecycles project.