Technology, classroom instruction and strategy

In setting up my final project, I decided to design a project based learning (PBL) lesson that journalism instructors could use for in high school or a 100-level course in journalism. It could also be used to help community groups who are trying to figure out coverage of their communities.

I will use two strategies from Really Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. They are Cooperative Learning and Summarizing and Note taking. Both of these learning strategies are played out every day in the real life experience of journalism. Journalists need to develop good collaborative skills. For example, through the course of a story, a reporter must work with sources, editors, sometimes a photographer, videographer or artist. Or they may sometimes be required to work with other reporters. Summarizing and note taking or actually note taking and summarizing is basically the job of journalists. It’s our role to find important and relevant information and synthesize it to make it relevant to our audience.

The Web 2.0 skills to be used in this project are wikis for writing collaboratively, Prezi for presenting the findings to an audience and a blog for reflecting on the experience.

There are a range of 21st Century skills that will be used or learned in this project. I’ll focus on assessing the following: Critical thinking, written and oral communication, collaboration, productivity and accountability and civic literacy.

I’ve created a rubric, using a combination of RubiStar and A+ Rubric, to provide guidance and assess student performance. A copy of the rubric is attached.