Learning Activity Project Guidelines  | CAT124 Winter 2016

Timeline:

• Topic proposal: Monday, January 25th (see topic proposal format below)
• Workshop your Draft Activity outline with HTMMA student during the weeks of February 22-26
• Presentations of Activity Projects to our class at HTMMA during 10th week seminar sessions March 8 & 10
• Post final version of Learning Activity and Documentation on WebCT/TED by 11:30 am on Tues, March 15th and email it to me as well

Overview:

Working alone or in pairs, develop a learning activity for middle school students that is designed to be carried out over several sessions or as long as an entire semester. You may select a theme of your choice. I encourage you to consider something that you either have some personal knowledge/expertise in or a strong interest in learning about yourself. Your project should involve teaching  about or through the use of one or more aspect of digital media/technology: You either can involve your students in thinking about some aspect of digital communication or you can develop an activity that employs digital media to teach in a creative or innovative way.

Proposal (Due Monday January 26^th as your WebCT/TED journal entry):

• Concept/Motivation: in one paragraph present the main idea or overview of the activity as you would to the HTMMA students.
• In one or two paragraphs explain the goals you hope the activity will achieve. Why do you think this is a good idea? How will individual students, the class, the school, and/or others gain from the project?
• Use additional paragraphs to describe any initial ideas about how you would approach the activity. This might also include your pedagogical approach or philosophy that is guiding your approach (which might be how you would explain it to me or to other teachers, administrators, etc).

Activity Plan Prototype (To be presented in a focus group of HTMMA students during your site visit the week of February 22^rd- 26^th):

Develop your plans for the activity and put them into a format that you can share with students at HTMMA for feedback. Try to make it as concrete as possible by including any documents or resources that you would use when assigning or initiating the activity in a class. This includes guidelines, worksheets, a timeline (which breaks down the activity step by step), examples, resources (for example, links to websites they might use if appropriate), etc. Be clear about your expectations. What are the requirements? What are options they will have? What type(s) of formal or informal assessment do you plan to incorporate?

You can consider the ways in which the activity accommodates varied levels of experience or knowledge on the part of different students.

It may be worthwhile to put your prototype in a PowerPoint, Prezi (http://prezi.com), Website or other presentation format, since you will be turning in your final version in one of these formats.

Workshop your activity prototype:

• During your site visit and our Tuesday meeting, the week of February 22 - 26, you will share your activity prototype with HTMMA students in small focus groups (and perhaps with one or two individual students). The idea is for you to get feedback from them about how they think the activity would work out.
• Be prepared with questions that you can use to facilitate a discussion about the activity amongst the students. Draw them out about various aspects of the activity: what they might add or change; what they think is valuable or fun about the experience; what seems too easy, difficult, boring, interesting, etc.  Ask them to talk about ideas that come to mind immediately for what they would do if assigned this activity.
• After workshopping the project, incorporate the responses and suggestions of the students as a part of your final presentation of the activity for our UCSD class.

Class Presentation: During the week of March 8 & 10 you will be presenting your learning activity projects to members of our comm120P class and the HTMMA students. Your presentation should be formatted as a Powerpoint, Prezi, Website or other multimedia format and should include:

• The first part of your presentation should be formatted as if you were addressing the students at HTMMA. It should include the introduction/motivation and a presentation of materials that you would use to introduce the project (guidelines, worksheets, resources, examples, etc). Also go over any sub-lessons/activities/units that you would use to support the students during the process of completing the activity.
• Follow this with a critical/analytical discussion (addressed to your peers and myself) of the goals and objectives of the activity. What do you think is the value of this learning experience? What are some of the (social, experiential, environmental, emotional) qualities of the activity that you hope to foster? What forms of feed back would you build into the activity to keep them on track? How would you assess the students' work or participation?
• Finally, discuss the feedback that you received from HTMMA students and how you took this into consideration in revising your project

Submitting Completed Activity Project:

A final copy of your learning activity project presentation should be shared on WebCT/TED and emailed to me by 11:30 am on Tues, March 15th.