BIG GUY IN A BOW TIE
  • Home
  • Membership
  • Bow Tie Blog
  • Resources
    • Free Resources
    • Active Presentations
    • Active Workshops
    • Retired Presentations
  • Media
    • YouTube
    • Websites
  • Tynker
    • Why Tynker?
    • Get Tynker Certified
  • Work with Me
    • About the Big Guy
    • Experience
    • Work With David

Make Learning More MeaningFUl by creating to Scenarios

11/15/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture

       Student creation is about more than just creating to create. You should want to create for a purpose. You should want to create for understanding and meaning. You should want to create to make the world a better place, and it all starts by building a scenario for the creation. Scenarios should always be your starting place.
      What do I mean by that? I see student projects all the time that are “just create something about the topic.” That topic could be anything, but what the teacher is going to get is always the same: bad power points and bad videos. What if you actually made them create for an audience? What if you made them solve a real-world problem? You could get more than just bad tech tools with regurgitated information. 
      To me, this takes me back to my days in the Social Studies classroom. In Social Studies, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of just having kids do a presentation to regurgitate information You have seen them a million times. They tend to have bad backgrounds, arguably plagiarized text, and images that just look weird. I thought there had to be more, and what I came to is that there had to be a scenario to create to. Instead of just giving them a topic, I gave them an audience. I put them in the history. They had to critically think like the people they were studying and like they were there.
      Does this sound hard? Well, it isn’t. There are thousands of scenarios you could use in any topic, but I found one that was always a good starting place if I got stuck: The United Nations. Think about it, they have a hand in everything. They work with plenty of data to tie math in. They are worried about the planet which ties in Science, and they are involved in politics which ties in Social Studies. With ELA, you can adapt grammar and writing projects to almost anything. It means you can have all four CORE subjects covered in one audience.
       The UN has even made it easier. They have published a set of 17 goals that they have for the planet by 2030. These are a great starting place! It sums up the world's problems beautifully and gives you a great place for kids to start solving them. There is also a massive teaching community around them, so you don’t even have to create all of the activities yourself!
      These can even be used for coding scenarios, and Tynker has done just that. Check out the Hour of Code projects based on the SDG's at https://www.tynker.com/hour-of-code/
Picture
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    January 2023
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    August 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013

    Categories

    All
    #edchat
    #edreform
    #edtech
    #education
    #iste

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Membership
  • Bow Tie Blog
  • Resources
    • Free Resources
    • Active Presentations
    • Active Workshops
    • Retired Presentations
  • Media
    • YouTube
    • Websites
  • Tynker
    • Why Tynker?
    • Get Tynker Certified
  • Work with Me
    • About the Big Guy
    • Experience
    • Work With David