com) are online fundraising sites that let you create online proposals and descriptions of what you want to do, and then publicize these through the site or by providing a link for you to share with those in your community to give to your effort. Tey handle management of your effort, including processing funds, keeping track of donors, and other related functions for a small portion of the funds collected.
these, you may want to turn to media sharing sites that are specific to this type of content. Slideshare (
www.slideshare. net) and SlideRocket (
www.sliderocket.com) are just two of the many types of sites that let you share your slideshow-style presentations. You can upload PowerPoint presentations (and other formats) to the site, embed these in your own web site, and even record audio narration to go with them, so that the presentation is just like what you might get in the classroom. Similarly, document sharing sites, like Scribd (
http://www.scribd.com) and Issuu (
www.issuu.com) let you share and embed large documents in your own site, or through their site, using their social networking tools to allow for comments, link- sharing, and other functionality.
Step 5: Evaluating the Project Of course, with any learning experience our students are engaged in, we want to be able to assess what students learned from the effort. When doing a project, we also want, for our own information, to evaluate the value of doing the project, both to the students, for you (worth doing again?), and for the community, if doing something that is broader in nature than just serving your own classroom. Most of this is best done
Step 4: Sharing the Project So, you’ve studied your local river, or built that schoolyard garden, or researched the founding of your town - what’s next? You want to present it, of course. In fact, most who have done projects with students would agree that one of the most powerful learning experiences for students is to present their project to a wider audience (i.e. more than the teacher and rest of the class). Most opportunities to share this information will take place in person, either by inviting people from the community to attend a class presentation or similar event. But, there are online tools to even support this: Evite (
www.evite.com) allows you to invite and manage attendees for an event. You can use a tool like this to publicize your presentations, as long as you have email addresses for the attendees.
If you want to share your efforts online, there are a couple easy options. One is to set up a website for your project - there are lots of options for this, including Blogger (
www.blogger.com), Google Sites (
http://sites.google.com), or a variety of other options. Tese can be great if the content is text or pictures, but is a little more challenging when the content is, say, a set of PowerPoint style presentations or a 10 page report. For
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off-line by asking your students questions about the project, or seeing their presentations or work involved in doing the project. But, to come full circle, you can use one of the survey tools mentioned in step one, as a way to get community feedback. Ideally, you can learn enough from this to sustain the project over time and let students continue to learn from doing projects.
For More Information: If you are interested in doing a project with your students and seeing the benefits that such a project can bring to the learning experience, you might want to check out Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss. For more information about these online tools, visit WebTools4Learning (
webtools4learning.org) for more detailed reviews, or check for the “Project Based Learning in the Cloud” workshop at the MACUL Annual Conference, March 16-18, 2011 in Detroit.
Stephen Best leads outreach and professional development efforts in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology at the University of Michigan. He is director of the statewide “Investigate the State” project and several other statewide efforts and can be reached at
sdbest@umich.edu.
Winter 2010/11
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MACULJOURNAL
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