Week 5: Project-based Learning, WebQuests, and Rubrics

Dear all,

This has been a challenging week, the task and the contents that we studied were related to Project-based learning (PBL), webquests and rubrics.

As for PBL, I learned that it is an instructional method that benefits both teachers and students. In fact, it is a method that makes students feel highly motivated because they get involved in active learning by solving problems, making decisions or investigating real problems; meanwhile teachers enhance in professionalism and collaboration with other teachers providing learners with essential life lessons in order to equip them with practical knowledge and experience to deal with real-life situations that they may encounter in their daily life.

This method is applicable in different contexts, especially in my class. I am going to apply PBL in my class in order to encourage my students to work in groups and to be creative and innovative proposing solutions about how to deal with discipline problems in an English classroom, for that they will work in groups in order to interview English teacher and propose solutions. This way, assessment is done based on what students can do, that is on how they apply knowledge and that is excellent.

Regarding WebQuests, it is the first time that I started to learn about it.WebQuests look really amazing and they are a form of PBL where the teacher creates a task, provides internet resources and ask learners to work in groups in order to do or produce something. I like this tool, but I do not feel comfortable yet to start using it in my english classes.

We also read and reflect on the way how to assess learning in an objective way by using rubrics. I created one using the tool rubistar, it was easy and fast. I created one to evaluate a task in which students were asked to read and summarize an article about environment analysis. These group of advanced learners belong to a reading and writing course.

The last activity was to step ahead on our project. I am going to address the lack of reading and writing skills on my students. I have decided to create a wiki where I will provide students some guidance and strategies for them to identify main ideas and to summarize information.

The tech resources that will help me to achieve this are:

• Recognizing the Main Idea http://www.proliteracyednet.org/downloads/44Recognize.swf. Here learners can identify a foundational part of any type of literature: the main idea.
• Understanding What You Read http://www.tv411.org/reading. where learners can find an array of video lessons that cover topics like reading newspapers, reading poems, summarizing and even reading medicine labels.

Please could you be so kind giving me advice on how to address this problem. Suggestions and comments are all welcome!!

Alba