20/20 Challenge

Challenge 20/20: Twenty Global Problems


I am very much interested to sign up for the 20/20 Challenge and would like to work on integrating the global problem on "Maritime Safety and Pollution". This is perfect for our Sharing the Planet: Waste Not, Want Not unit in 4th grade. Its transdisciplinary theme is an inquiry into the rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution. The goal is for students to understand that communities have the responsibility to manage finite resources to positively impact our quality of life. We will be learning about how we pollute our planet and how much this has affected other living things causing too much damage to the planet and extinction to some animal species. Considering that this prevailing problem doesn't only happen in Mexico, it will be a great learning experience to hear from students and teachers from other countries what pollution has done to their country as well and come up with a solution together. 

Collaborating with other students will develop higher level thinking skills as each group will learn from each other. It will also develop oral communication and positive social interaction as they learn to work well together. It will also promote good relationships between races and openness to diversity as both teams come up with alternative problem solutions, resembling a real life social or even employment situations. 

Advertisement

My group mates and I did an advertisement to promote the use of electric fans. The idea is to stress out the negative effects of global warming in an entertaining manner. We wanted the advertisement to serve as an eye-opener and expose the perils of mankind's recklessness therefore the images we chose were appropriate for this purpose. The contrast between the images of the  how beautiful earth was and images of how much we have destroyed it contributed to the message. The polar bears having a sweet time because of the cooling power of the electric fan is very humorous. We are targeting the general public as our audience.

Daniel Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation

http://pixelnase.deviantart.com/art/Creativity-is-boundless-75543114

After watching the video, Dan Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation, the questions that came to my mind were the following “How can you not reward kids, 4^th graders for that matter, if their motivation is to please the very high demands of their parents who in return, give them rewards? If at ages 10-11, most of them have not learned the value of self-motivation and finds self worth with the amount of rewards they get? How can you deprive these generation of 4^th graders a comfortable habit or even a culture?

But thinking through it and reading more articles I realized that constant gratification in the form of rewards could actually do more harm than good.  It can limit what creative minds can do by focusing on the reward ahead instead of the task at hand. If we shift our goal as educators to nurture creativity and develop creative knowledge from teaching mechanical skills, both parents and students should be educated on the importance of intrinsic motivation.  Teachers should create a learning atmosphere where motivation is around the desire to have autonomy, mastery and purpose. Majority of our students are rarely allowed to choose their path, they are often coerced or persuaded based on others expectations. A change of habits of mind should be promoted by allowing students to take risks, make mistakes and celebrate lessons learned from these mistakes. We should educate based on creative capacities and not on academic abilities by structuring classes, student assessments and classroom activities to promote self-motivation as a habit. #PA3a

Additional Resource: – Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Making Traditional Projects VS. Project Based Learning

In PBL, teachers serve as co-designers, guides and facilitators providing students with different possibilities to gather answers. PBL creates a challenge to align the need-to-knows with standards focusing both on content and skills used, making the activity totally engaging. Skills such as effective presentation as students are to present to a real audience, working in groups and problem solving are essential. While in traditional projects, hard work has already been done even before the project is accomplished. Teachers hold students accountable for the grades that they will get while in PBL, teachers serve as coaches guiding students to make connections. Traditional projects require all students to go through the same steps producing the same final products and teachers are deemed to have the right answers while PBL provide differentiated scaffoldings and engagements allowing variety in final products. Students are also empowered to get the right answers from the web. 

Assignment PA2b

An Introduction to Project-Based Learning

I’ve always been a believer that in teaching and learning all the verbs should be handed down to the students by the teacher. Some of these verbs are respond/answer, act/perform, investigate/research, design/strategize, achieve/accomplish, and present/display among a list of so many. Students in my classroom are expected to "learn by doing". I realized that my definition of PBL is the same before and after watching the video An Introduction to Project-Based Learning. Now, instead of calling such learning as “student initiated projects/activities” I’d be using the universal term for it.

I can therefore conclude that I have been teaching through PBL in my classroom for quite some time now. One example of which is, my students for the past 3 years have been publishing children’s books. These were sold at ASF to raise funds for scholars. They were taught the process of book writing and were expected to write an original story with a moral lesson. They were to do in depth research about characters and settings. They also worked with an editor through Skype or communicate with him via email and share their project through Google doc. We also did a classroom activity called the “Travel Fair,” where students took the role of travel agents. They were to act as a citizen of a country assigned to them and learned everything there was to know about that country in order to promote it.

As part of Unit of Inquiry final projects, students in 4^th grade at ASF are required to come up with an opera, where every aspect of it is an original creation of the students. 5^th graders also work on an exhibition, showcasing a comprehensive study of current issues that leads to solutions to global problems.