Chapter 3

1 1.     “The Big Idea” for a project has to do with what the whole project is centered around. The “Big Idea” can be a topic, question, experiment, and so on. Having this “Big Idea” allows for concepts and processes to be centered around this.

2 2.    Some of the 21^st Century skills are: remember, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The skills: analyze, evaluate, and create are the most relevant skills to PBL. Going in depth, analyze has to deal with examining, investigating and explaining. Evaluating has to deal with judging, justifying, and debating. Lastly, the skill, create has to deal with adapting, combining, and designing.

3 3.     21^st literacies are tools that allow for a deeper understanding of important questions, topics and themes. There are multiple subjects that deal with literacies, such as, basic language, visual, spatial, historical, cultural, information, political, news media, scientific, and mathematical. This allows them to participate more in their society.

4 4.     There are 8 learning functions that are essential in learning. (1) Ubiquity, Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom, and All the Time is about how students will be more mobile and learn whenever they are, whenever they want and more frequently. (2) Deep Learning is about how to learn more depth by navigating, sorting, organizing, analyzing, and making graphical representations to learn. (3) Making Things Visible and Discussable allows for the students to make mind maps and other representations to show their thinking. (4) Expressing Ourselves, Sharing Ideas, Building Community lets students to express their ideas and build society around shared interests. (5) Collaboration – Teaching and Learning with Others is about the tools that help students learn together. (6) Research helps students make sense of and organize what they need from the Web. (7) Project Management: Planning and Organization helps students manage multiple things at once, such as, time, work, sources, feedback, drafts and products during projects. (8) Reflection and Iteration is about looking back at work and thinking about how it went and what could have changed.

5 5.    “The Big Idea” can relate to our project because our ideas all relate to our topic, Staying Healthy. Also, all the 21^st Century skills and literacies occur during the process of coming with ideas and thoughts for our projects.