Week 2 MOOC:

Hi Everybody,

I thought the MOOC was great this week.  It has really pushed on my practice and has me thinking a lot about IB and how I can make what we are already doing so effectively in classroom practice and make it digital.  I thought the videos Dan posted helped to answer a question that has long dogged me when it comes to digital project.  Often times I have seen things presented at Tech conferences that look really cool from a tech perspective but lack the depth and rigor I would expect from a student.  It is very clear to me now that the backend part of the project probably wasn't as explicitly laid out as it needed to be to get students to mastery.  In other words, the inquiry process should be student based and rooted in the real world so it will speak to students, but the planning of it should still have all the elements of backward design.  I know I have experienced the same problem when I use technology on my classroom.  I think I now know where my issues lie.  For me, a lot of my projects have the "dessert" feel that Dan was discussing.  They are add ons after the students have encountered the learning not driven through inquiry and presented digitally.  In addition, I have not designed these projects to be self guided.  My students are always asking me procedural questions instead of letting me use my time deepening their inquiries.  This weeks MOOC helped me see that I need to go back to the drawing board next year and use these lens to evaluate all of our units of inquiry technology pieces.  The great news is that this model fits so beautifully with the IB philosophy and mode of instruction that I can see this being perfect for the PYP program.  

Long winded, but I wanted to save my thinking here so I can reflect on this during planning for next year.  

I decided to take the "When Will We Ever Use This?" Challenge.  

I am thinking about the work that my class does around positive and negative integers.  this is a lesson, or series of lessons that we do at the end of the year in 5th grade.  I know that upper math teacher will point out that they will need this skill for higher math skills all the time and that negative numbers are an essential element of number sense.  I agree whole heartedly but this can be a concept that is difficult for 5th graders to understand why this knowledge is important in their lives.  I was also thinking about the woefully neglected standards thrown in with Social Studies on economics and personal finance.  These poor standards are often treated like a forgotten package of tofu.  We have the best intentions to use the tofu, we really do, but life and the standardized test get in the way.  In addition, these are both areas where I find my practice and application with my students really lacking.

Here is my new plan for unveiling these standards using Inquiry Based Project Learning:

Learning Objective:

IWBAT identify the median income for an average worker based on educational level

IWBAT use this average income to plan a budget for my family.

Initiating Activity:
Students will watch a video on people talking about the importance of budgeting and the difficulties that they have in making the money stretch when they are limited by their education.

Students will draw cards that gives them the level of education that they have completed.

Students will research the average or median income of people with that level of education.  (We will discuss outliers and how some people are able to make more than the average incomes because I know Bill Gates will come up)

Students will brainstorm all the different costs associated with running a household with 4 people in it.

Teacher will do some direct instruction on the rules of positive and negative integers.

Students will create a excel spreadsheet to manage the budget. 

Students will draw chance cards every day in class.  These will include some positive cards but most cards will include the usual whammies that most of us experience.  

At the end of the week, students will analyze their data and decide what to move around in their budget to keep themselves in the black.  

At the end of 4 weeks, students will write a cause and effect essay on their data and make some correlation between their income and expenses and how their budget ended up.

It would be nice to see if we can have Junior Achievement Volunteers work with the students to set up the budgets.

At some point, students running in the red will be offered a credit card with 24% to help with expenses. We will do some lessons on compound interest so they can get the idea that credit cards are not free money and that they can prove dangerous.