Reading Reflection #3

Kent Rodman

1. The "Big Idea" should be something that can be focused around. Something that has many things that can be branched off of it. A good "big idea" is something that focuses on things children and their families actually deal with in the real world.
2. 21st century skills are analyze, evaluate, and create. If these higher-order thinking skills are mastered your project can evolve. The Bloom categories move from lower-order (typical instructional) to higher order (project realm.)
3. 21st century literacies are no longer simply reading and writing. In order to be literate you must be able to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute to name a few. In other words literacy is being able to keep up in a modern world.
4. The essential learning functions are:     Ubiquity is the opportunity to learn anytime and anywhere. Deep learning is when students use higher-order thinking to navigate, sort, organize, analyze,  and make graphical representations in order to learn and express learning. Making things visible and discussable is important in order to get and keep conversations going. Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, and building community are everywhere and since we are in an internet age expression has never been easier. Collaboration is important for bringing experts and ameatures together and many tools are now easily accessible for this. Research has never been easier, instead of searching for hours in a library we can simply type a sentence on our computer and see hundreds of results. Project management helps students manage time, wrok, sources, feedback draft, and products during a project. Reflection and iteration is important to see alternate perspectives and reshaping ideas. It has never been easier to edit, share and write together using tools such as wiki.
5. Concepts in this chapter relate directly to our topic. By doing a project together in and outside of class we must work collectively and share ideas. Project management, ubiquity, research, expression of ideas, every other essential learning function are taking place in order to accomplish a collective project goal.