Learning in the Cloud Project Based
Online Tools to Support Every Step of the Project
By Stephen Best, SIGPL Director
So, you’re looking to do a project with your students. Whatever it may be, did you know that there are a number of technologies that can support, or even be the focus of project-based learning? To better understand these, let’s look at five basic steps of doing a project, and along the way see a few tools that
can be used to address each process. Step 1: Posing the Project Most projects are created to either respond to a specific need (i.e. service learning projects) or a hypothetical situation, such as designing a new playground or creating a plan for a new business. Such projects, when done as a class, oſten need input from students and sometimes from other members of the community. Survey tools, such as Zoomerang (
www.zoomerang.com) or Survey Monkey (
www.surveymonkey.com) can be a way to start and get input from students or parents about what would be best to do. Each of these tools, along with the new Forms tool in Google Docs (which we’ll address later) provides an easy to create web-based survey than can give you immediate feedback in terms of what people are voting for, and any comments they might have to go with their vote. Each of these tools allows you (or students, with
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some guidance) to create a simple poll or questionnaire with a link to email to a larger group, or to post within a web page. Tese sites also include a number of video tutorials showing how to set up the tool in a few minutes. And, like all of the other sites referred to in this article, you can set up a free basic account to access these services.
Some projects, especially those that are part of an inquiry-based curriculum, start with a driving question that guides the work, such as “Is our river healthy?” or “How did our city/town get started?” Tese don’t really need survey tools to start, since you would pose these questions as a way to initiate the project (and address your curriculum standards and content expectations) - projects like these jump into the next phase...
Step 2: Planning the Project Once you have determined your project goal or problem to address, you and your students need to
Winter 2010/11
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MACULJOURNAL
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