Independent Project Deadlines

We only have twelve days left of class officially, though some of you will be out at least one or two of those days for portfolio conferences.

Juniors, your portfolio presentation days are May 29th and 30th. You may not have class next Thursday. That leaves you 9 days to complete your projects. If you do not finish your project in time for portfolio, you may still turn it in before June 16th, the last day of the 3rd marking period. You can always use the project in your senior portfolio. If you plan on using your project in your portfolio, you need to submit the project to me by Wednesday May 28th so I can grade the project and give you a grade sheet. If you need a laptop to present your project during Portfolio, please sign up for one on your portfolio day. Send me an email with the request.

Seniors, your projects are due Wednesday June 11th if you plan on including the project in your portfolio so that I can give you a grade sheet. Please try and get the project turned in before then, so that you have time to incorporate the project into your portfolio letter.

Regardless of whether or not you finish your project or use it in your portfolio, we will be giving brief presentations the final week of school on our overall progress.

Help Sign-Up

Now that we are in the final marking period of your projects, I will be working with individuals and groups at your stations and/or on the overhead to help you accomplish specific parts of your projects. Please take a minute now and think about what you need help with on your project. Before you post your request, do you think anyone else in your group needs to know the same thing? If so, make sure you note that in your request. When you have a request for individual or group help, please post it as a comment below.

I will be working this week with individuals and groups based on your requests. Consider this a sign up sheet for help. The sooner you post your request the sooner I can help you or model a demo for your group. You can also post requests of things you need like signing out a camera, getting a pass, requesting times to film outside of class, or specific materials.

As always, you must post your goals for the week and reflect on last week's goals. It's a new marking period, please be aware that many of you did not post regular weekly goals and respond to them regarding your progress.

Project Conference Agenda

This week the 2nd Marking Period ends and part of your assessment includes a brief project conference. Today you will have time to prepare for your meeting by gathering together all of your evidence that you have produced so far. Examples of evidence include photographs, videos, surveys, research, and/or art work. You have to show me progress that indicates that you will be able to finish your project for your portfolio.

When we conference on Wednesday and Thursday, I will be looking to evaluate your progress according to the following criteria.

PLANNING

• Have you defined a problem to solve for your project?
• Have you developed a possible solution with the project?
• Have you identified clear steps towards finishing your project including resources and goals?

TAKING ACTION/EXPERIMENTING

• Have you persisted in accomplishing your goals?
• What practices and activities have you engaged in?
  

ASSESSING/GATHERING EVIDENCE

• Have you begun to organize your evidence into a presentation form?
• Can you show evidence of your research, thinking, or creating?

REFLECTION/EVALUATION

• Have you reflected on your project and your thinking?
• Have you learned anything about your own strengths and weaknesses as a learner?
• What Habit of Mind do you think are relying up the most?
  

MODIFICATION

• Have you changed your project based on new knowledge?
• Has your thinking about your project changed in any way based on new knowledge?

You can use your class time today to answer these questions or prepare to show me evidence that answers the questions using your blog and/or anything that you have researched or created. You should be able to show me examples of your learning or prepare an answer for each question.

Video Blog Entries

How do you see yourself using video on your blog or in your project?
Post a reply as a comment below and then we will begin our introduction to iMovie and iSight so that you can learn how to record your own project intros, interviews, and weekly goals, updates, and/or reflections.

We will spend some time this week learning the steps to record, edit, and publish our project introductions on online.

Project Interview Blog Post

The final step of your interview is to publish your interview to your blog. You will be posting the interview where you answered the questions, since they pertain to your project. It will provide blog visitors with an insightful reflection into your own thinking about the project. Yesterday Saquaya asked a good question about the interview "How do you propose questions for a project that is thoroughly explained within the blog and what the person has explained yesterday?"

The goal of the interview is not to have the interviewee restate their thesis, but to discover where they are within the project now. It has been more than two months since we began this process, and the interview is simply a way to get the interviewee to reflect on their progress in a public way that should be interesting for others to read.

By the end of class today, each interviewer and interviewee should have finished writing and responding to both rounds of questions suggested in yesterday's protocol. To post your interview to your blog, open the completed interview document in Google docs and click the SHARE option and select the PUBLISH AS WEB PAGE option. On the next page, click the POST TO BLOG option. It will post the interview directly to your blog for others to read.

Interview Questions

Today, based on your research, you will begin the second step of your project interview with your partner. The purpose of the interview, really, is to help your partner become aware of their thinking about the project. How does someone become aware of their own thinking? It takes self awareness and conscious reflection on one's actions, beliefs, knowledge, and ideas. We do this all the time when we make decisions that affect ourselves and others. We also tend to think more about what we say when we talk publicly or in front of others. Your interviews will be published on your blogs and selected ones will be published on the class blog.

We will conduct the interviews by sharing our questions through Google documents between the interviewer and the interviewee. Today, you will develop specific questions for your interviewee based on the following protocol for two rounds of questions. Your questions should cover the following areas:

Round 1

• Clarify the project goals and purposes. Why are they doing the project? What is important about it? How do they expect it to turn out in the end?
  
• Planning. What actions have they taken so far? What actions do they still need to take? What will be the evidence they produce? How will they collect data? What obstacles or roadblocks do they expect to encounter?
• Taking Action and experimenting. What are the different ways they have been working?
  
• Assessing and Gathering evidence. What evidence have they produced so far? What have they made? What date have they collected?
  
  
  Round 2
  
• Studying, reflecting, and evaluating. Have they met their goals? What have they learned so far doing the project? Have they learned new information? Have they learned something about themselves?
  
• Modification. Have they had to make any changes to their project or plan? Has their thinking about the subject changed? Would they do anything differently now?
• Revisiting goals and purposes. Does the project still make sense?
  

Write out four (4) questions based on the first four (4) areas of feedback and share the document with your partner. They will write their answers and save the document. Then based on their answers write out three (3) more questions for the last three areas of feedback and save the document. Your partner will answer the rest of the questions. You should be able to finish the interview today. You should try to address your partners project by modifying the questions that you feel are important for them.

For example: Adam, why are drawing cartoon characters? What do you want to show people? Well, you see, the thing is, I got mad skills as an artist and, you see, I'm trying to demonstrate my creativity. I really didn't know what else to do, but I'm trying to accomplish something I'm good at, yo.

Project Interviews

Your homework from last week was to produce some evidence of your learning. As your teacher, I am looking to see some tangible proof of your progress. This is a form of assessment, but it will take some time to give you feedback about the evidence you produce. In a self-regulated learning environment, students are also responsible for finding new and open ways of getting feedback on their learning. Take the first five minutes of class to post a quick comment reflecting on your goals from last week if you have not done so.

One way of gaining valuable feedback about your stated goals and the outcomes so far is to conduct an interview with a peer. Today you will chose an interview partner whose project isn't immediately familiar to you. You cannot chose your closest friend. The point of the interview is twofold; (1) you will devise some questions for the student to help them reflect on and evaluate their learning and (2) give you the opportunity to be a 'critical friend'. A critical friend is an active listener who offers feedback and provides their insight to the speaker.

The interviews will be conducted in three stages this week. Today you will chose an interview partner and conduct some basic research about your interview partner. You need to read their blog page, analyze any evidence they have produced so far (surveys, video, photographs, planning, lists, drawings, sketches), and/or discuss with their idea with them briefly if there is little or no visible evidence. When you have finished your preliminary research, open a new Google document and write a brief (1 paragraph) summary of what you believe their project is about. Save the document as Interview with insert student's name.

This step should not take the whole class period, and you should continue work on your own project. As usual, you also have to post three new project goals for the weeks of April 15th - April 29th on your blog. These project goals include the time off you have for spring break, so you should plan accordingly. Is there a big step you want to complete during your time off? You should definitely take the opportunity to get a part of your project done.