My First Foray in to Digital Project-Based Learning

So teaching Geography has allowed me to make the transition into digital project-based learning this year (have a look).

In Year 10 we have a unit about Australia and its Regional and Global Links. This is my third year teaching this year group. My first year I came up with a unit which forced the students to work independently gathering info on the web with a powerpoint presentation at the end of the year. It didn't go that well. It was mostly fact-finding and lacking in any real 'work' by the students. I got back some uninspiring powerpoint presentations.

In the second year I made a big upgrade introducing the use of Google Maps and the website Stat Planet. Both these sections brought about a significant uptick in quality. Still, the project lacked that independent 'problem solving' element. This was much more about the allure of some flashy websites.

So this year I took it to the next level. Since all of my students are working on blogs (Blogger) they have a decent understanding of the bare basics of running a website. This got me thinking about how I could make this project 'digital'.

I have been doing a ton of work with my blog for this class but my ICT officer at school, who has been super impressed/supportive of the steps I've taken with my class, told me that I had to get on Google Sites. I've heard this before, had a play, and wasn't impressed. To me, Google Sites lack the intuitive nature of Blogger or Wordpress and didn't seem worth the extra complication.

Anyways, I had a play again after becoming quite handy with Blogger. This time I had a play with a specific intent to embed my class blog into the homepage. This is the hub of my class and I need it to be the focal point of my site. With this specific goal in mind I played around with some basic html scripts I figured out to embed Google Docs on my blog and finally got my website embeded into the homepage. (Turns out that there is a far simpler way to do this in the 'insert' function.)

Back to the project: So, in my effort to figure out Google Sites for my classes I realized that this is going to be PERFECT for my students' projects. They are going to create wiki's for all their work. (Here's my example for the class.)

Nice. This makes it more 'digital' but how was I going to make it include a 'real-world problem solving' element?

I decided that I was going to have all my students become 'spies in training'. This part of their training would require them to become adapt at gathering information and then becoming a expert on two countries Australia interacts with and then create an position statement as to how Australia should interact in the near and long-term future with an important regional neighbour.

This would require them to take all the information that they have gathered and then make an informed conclusion of their own.

One week in and so far, so good. The first two lessons have started slow but it is looking good.

Will keep you up dated.

Cav