Reading Reflection 1

1. As you start the journey through Project Based Learning, you may need to put in a little bit more effort due to creating projects that are collaborative. There is a lot of work that has to be done by the teacher, such as getting all of the information (websites) for students look up as well as thinking of new innovative ways to incorporate technology or the newest rising trend into your lesson plans. You, the teacher, give a basic outline of the project and let the students take it from there. It might be different and hard to grasp but it seems as if the students learn and can retain a lot more from it.
2. The overall benefits of PBL are: Advancing the classroom from its traditional state, students incorporate their findings from their project into the real world, there are blogs for teachers in case they want help with their PBL lessons or just want some more ideas.
3. Benefits to students in PBL: deepening students understanding of subjects, students can learn how to use new technology or trends in order to solve problems (teachers are preparing them for future jobs that haven't even been created), collaboration in order to get outside their comfort zone and become leaders of their own, helps students learn how to deal with everyday projects that they will deal with in life, developing good inquiry skills.
4. With the concept of PBL, there are many things that need to be considered; there are always new technologies coming out that you may not know about in which you need to keep updated through blogs or other tech gateways, the way you talk with students and having to interact differently with each student, arrangement of your class in order to make learning beneficial, you may need to curve your expectation goals as well as changing your classroom management style since you will need to help your students manage their own progress.
5. New Technology High is definitely a model school because they are preparing their students for the real world; to live on their own and to have a job that they have to impress a boss in order to get a promotion and support a family. They make it easy for students to be able to do projects since all of the computers are linked to the same server. Teachers at New Tech have meetings with each other in order to plan and staff meetings so that everyone is on the same page of instruction. Within the teacher environment, they are able to swap lesson plan projects so that they can adapt them to their own classrooms.