PBL - A Lesson in Health

The "My Healthy Self Project" that was conducted by a classroom of first graders was absolutely ingenious!  The project itself posed the question of "what makes us sick?" to a group of young learners.  Children are some of the most likely to catch the common cold or bug, and are often the culprit of their own misfortunes, due to a lack of understanding in how to properly care for their bodies so early on in life.  With this project, kids were able to get a better understanding of not only what they need to do to keep themselves healthy, but what measures combined lead to good health.  They looked a nutritional labels, analyzed good health habits versus the bad, and noticed the benefits of being active in life.

The class utilized the most umportatn of upper level thinking skills from Bloom's taxonomy - evaluation.  This is the most upper division of thinking skills.  When evaluating, a student is looking at how something works as a whole, not only on one level, but with everything it can be combined with.  They learned how to judge good health habits, and how best to initiate them, by even creating a class health center.  

The only way that this project might be improved would be to integrate ideas relating to it in their future education.  Yes, they did continue to have good, enduring health habits through the year, but keeping a focus on it, if not even just a thought in the back of the mind about it, would help to keep them healthy all their lives, as well as pass on vital knowledge to those around them, for a healthier community.

Telecollaboration - Evaluate!

In educating a classroom, there is so much that students need to know.  When it is taken into consideration exactly what students need to be able to do, the two most important things it came down to were synthesis and evaluation.  When a student is able to work with others in their class, they can together further their learning process.  If they are able to complete a task together with a combined effort, all involved can benefit - not only in their grades, but in how they can also further develop their cognitive skills.

In Bloom's taxonomy of the Cognitive domain, one of the two most important things for a student to be able to do is evaluate.  Technology today can be one of the most beneficial resources available to students.  Different programs allow them to work with classmates to bring together all of their elements of their projects.  Putting the pieces together with ease and seeing how everything fits together can simply show a student the ways in which a puzzle of a project can come together.  "Students writing collaboratively provide feedback on each others writing using Common Space, a communication and feedback software. Because the students' comments appear in separate columns set up for each writer, this software facilitates collaborative writing by bringing together feedback from each group member onto one draft, without losing track of the source of each response" ("Commonly Asked Questions about Teaching Collaborative Activities").  With programs like this available, students can critique their groupmates work, and get constructive feedback on their own, allowing their work to improve as a whole, and allow them to understand what to avoid the next time around.