We built a book.
Rome wasn’t built in a day is what keeps coming to mind when I think of our project based approach. It is sometimes hard for me to see the deeper meaning behind certain lessons. At first I felt that I really wanted to hear lectures about pertinent Alaska History. Who decides what is pertinent though? I think this set up allowed us to be creative and dictate what we thought was important. The time pressure of the publishing date on iBooks I think lit a fire in most of us. I do think that as a teacher I wouldn’t have minded a brief overview of the state of Alaska in a powerpoint form with a iPhone game (I can’t remember what it was called – with the concert goers app) something like that would’ve been a great intro.
I think ultimately I learned from this course not to be afraid of introducing different technologies. Really setting this up for a longer term project would’ve been great, but I’m glad we developed a baseline for what one can do.
I appreciated it.
Rome didn’t come up with good spaghetti sauce in a day either! There is subjectivity in what teachers think is important. I think that is heart of the art of teaching. I also wish the book was done a little quicker so we could have reviewed it and made a blog post about the sections. I think that would have filled a bit of the class title void people were feeling. One of my major lessons I got out of this was that project-based learning is good to do if you need to teach a class and have limited knowledge of it! Which, I believe, is a good takeaway.
Haha. Yeah, Peter pulled a great approach out of his pocket.
I think I learned a lot more about Alaska than I would if we had just been given content to study. I found the terror I had at knowing so little about Alaska made me really invested in learning as much as I could. I had so many questions for everyone in the class that knew more than me. It was really great.
I’m still baffled by how much perspective I gained from those collaborative edits on the last day- it was really a fantastic part of the project.
I’m also a little conflicted about what I learned about Alaska. I think the entirely project-based approach to Alaska History is wonderful for people who are from Alaska and have already learned Alaska History in school. Since I’m not originally from here, though, and I’m going to be teaching in a school where the students come from all over, I would probably have benefited from learning a little bit about every region rather than a lot about one. My takeaway from this is that I would like to embed a project like this within a larger class, so as to give the students a chance to develop both depth and breadth of knowledge.