Our middle school is on the outer edge a large urban and suburban district. We have a diverse population ranging from the very affluent to the very impoverished.
We are a STEM and PBL (project based learning) focused school and our students love to be creative in showing what they know.
We have great elementary schools feeding into our one middle school and our kids are generally familiar with the idea of project-based learning at the start of middle school. Sixth grade is spent focusing on refining their knowledge and developing deeper content understanding.
Our greatest challenge is the broad range of student access to resources created by our large and diverse school cluster. While all of our students are eager to learn through hands-on, student-driven projects, not all of our students have equal access to the resources that will allow them to participate in these projects to their fullest.
My Project
Imagine a classroom where students are not only learning key concepts about a single topic, but rather making deep connections between their learning in multiple subject areas. Students work collaboratively to create videos that share what they are learning and show specific details of how science, math, and language arts topics merge into real world learning that can be shared with their local school and community.
Students love to work collaboratively and creatively to show what they are learning and find connections between subject areas.
Even better, student motivation improves when they see the "real world" value of their work. For example, students will be able to use their research about the planets of our solar system to identify which planet might best support a future human colony, then use their math skills to draft a layout and plan for what that colony could look like and finally write a detailed script and proposal for language arts. Students can use the camera and accessories to film their proposal, edit their video using the Chromebooks, and finally share with all of their teachers how they have integrated their learning in science, math, and language arts into one finished product.
This kind of project based learning allows students to see that what they learn in school last far beyond the year they spend with us, and these technological tools will allow them to broadcast their learning to our partner elementary schools and to future students.
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